Mercado Bitcoin Hack: Trace the $46M Stolen On-Chain

Click here for Arkham's Mercado Bitcoin Hacker entity profile.

Brazil's largest crypto exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, has been hacked for at least $46 million. On November 2, an attacker began draining Mercado Bitcoin hot wallets across at least ten blockchains, starting on Base at 01:22 UTC.

You can interact with the stolen funds with the hacker's Arkham entity profile in the window below:

Mercado Bitcoin Hacker

How It Happened

Mercado Bitcoin confirmed unauthorized access to one of its systems and said the incident has been contained. It has not said which system was compromised, but says there was no harm to customers and no data breach.

The attacker opened with a 0.0001 ETH test transaction from Mercado Bitcoin's Base hot wallet.

The hacker then took 2,852 ETH ($6.52M) from a Mercado Bitcoin hot wallet 06:24 UTC. Within two minutes, the attacker had also taken $2.99M USDT and $2.24M USDC.

Hacker initial address: 0xe485e7A70b1131216Cb47CA4555c4Bbb2C742478

At 06:41 UTC, the attacker swept 104.43 BTC ($8.16M) from Mercado Bitcoin's Bitcoin hot wallet. They also drained SOL, TRX, stablecoins on Tron and Solana, and dozens of ERC-20 tokens including PEPE, ONDO, PENDLE, VIRTUAL and UNI.

Memecoins Dumped

The attacker is now selling off smaller tokens. Arkham data shows 287 swaps from the hacker's wallets, dumping tokens such as RENDER, WIF, KMNO and POPCAT. 

Tether has frozen $4.5 million in USDT linked to the hack, according to CEO Paolo Ardoino.

Second Hack In A Week

The attack comes four days after Binance lost $6.36 billion in the largest crypto hack in history. No group has been linked to the Mercado Bitcoin hack. The exchange has suspended deposits and withdrawals and says it is working with authorities.

This is a developing story.