WazirX moved over $73 million crypto after data breach: CoinSwitch

WazirX, which is staring at liabilities worth $546.5 million, transferred $72.13 million worth of crypto to Bybit and $1.5 million funds to Kucoin, Ashish Singhal, co-founder and CEO, CoinSwitch, said

Embattled crypto exchange WazirX cumulatively moved over $73 million worth of crypto to exchanges such as Bybit and Kucoin following a security breach on the platform, which led to a theft of $230 million, a senior executive from CoinSwitch, a rival crypto company, alleged on Monday.

WazirX, which is staring at liabilities worth $546.5 million, transferred $72.13 million worth of crypto to Bybit and $1.5 million funds to Kucoin, Ashish Singhal, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), CoinSwitch, said.

While WazirX did not deny the allegation in its official statement, it added that CoinSwitch should instead provide users real-time tracking of proof of reserves and wallet addresses. 

“CSK (CoinSwitch) has made a dashboard of our wallet addresses, but their users have been asking for CSK's real time proof of reserve and all the wallet addresses of CSK and they have not provided anything where people can track in real-time. While we have gone ahead and done the same for tracking real time wallets of WazirX. It shows how easy it is to build a dashboard but unfortunately they themselves haven’t built it for their customers who have been demanding for many years now,” a WazirX spokesperson said in a statement. 

Singhal’s crypto firm has investments in Indian rupees (INR) and virtual digital assets (VDAs) deposited with WazirX.

“We are pursuing legal action against WazirX to recover our funds, so it’s important for us to understand the information they have shared deeply,” he said in a statement.

CoinSwitch is taking legal action against WazirX to recover 2 per cent of its funds from the platform. 

It held Rs 12.4 crore in INR, Rs 28.7 crore in ERC20 tokens, and Rs 39.9 crore in other tokens on WazirX.

WazirX lost about 45 per cent of its crypto assets to the security breach. The company has released data of over 240,000 wallet addresses as part of an affidavit they filed in the High Court of Singapore.

Last month, a Singapore court granted a four-month moratorium to WazirX, a period which the embattled firm will use to restructure its business without worrying about legal proceedings.

A moratorium offers applicants temporary relief from legal proceedings.

The crypto exchange said it was restructuring and as part of that it was looking for a white knight to provide capital and pursue partnership and collaboration.

This entails implementation of revenue-generating products and mechanisms to share profit with users, tracing and recovering stolen crypto assets, and/or allowing users who need liquidity urgently to withdraw crypto assets more quickly and exit restructuring.