WazirX hack sees $200m in crypto swapped for ETH to thwart blocking

Funds stolen via the July 18 hack on Indian crypto exchange WazirX is being swapped for Ether (ETH).

Data from the on-chain tracker SpotOnChain indicates the attacker has converted over $200 million worth of the siphoned assets to ETH. At the time of publication, the blacklisted wallet held 59,097 ETH.

15,298 ETH was stolen directly from WazirX’s multisig wallet, alongside 200 different crypto assets, including $102 million worth of SHIB, $11.25 million worth of MATIC, $7.6 million worth of PEPE, $7.79 million worth of USDT, and $3.5 million worth of GALA.

Most of these assets have been swapped for ETH with the wallet currently holding just over $11 million worth of altcoins such as Chromia (CHR), Celer Network (CELR), Frontier (FRONT) and Ooki (OOKI) tokens.

Meanwhile, blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain highlighted that the hacker made a deposit of 7.7 million DENT tokens to a Binance address, adding that the wallet “has not been used before.”

Iakov Levin, co-founder Rivo, told crypto.news that the hacker likely swapped the ERC-20 tokens to Ether due its high liquidity. He also underlined that it is “not possible to block ETH like stablecoins.”

ERC-20 tokens have a contract function that allows contract owners to maintain a list of addresses that are prohibited from participating in token transactions. This is typically implemented using a mapping structure in the smart contract, which checks the blacklist before executing transfers, thus preventing any interaction with the blacklisted addresses.

In contrast, ETH lacks this feature since it operates on the core Ethereum protocol, which does not allow for the modification of address permissions.

Akhsay Nassa, co-founder of Chimp DEX, also had a similar opinion, explaining that the attacker wants to prevent the funds from being frozen by authorities.

“With a large, active market, ETH allows for quick and fair trades. Moreover, its numerous cross-chain bridges and exchanges enable easy movement between blockchains, further obscuring the trail,” he added.

The attack was the result of the exchange’s wallet management system being exploited. There were discrepencies in data displayed for Liminal, the digital asset custody and wallet infrastructure provider for the exchange.

“We suspect the payload was replaced to transfer wallet control to an attacker,” the WazirX team said in its post-mortem of the incident.

Meanwhile, crypto sleuth ZachXBT speculated that North Korea’s Lazarus group may have been involved. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic also came to a similar conclusion.

WazirX halted withdrawals for both crypto and fiat and has vowed to recover the funds.