The SHIB community was thrust into a state of panic on Thursday following a malicious breach targeting India’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, WazirX.
Notably, Cyber Alerts, a prominent monitoring service, flagged the incident earlier in the day. It revealed that the attacker executed suspicious transactions from WazirX’s multi-sig wallet, forcing the exchange to suspend all withdrawals.
These transactions amounted to a staggering $234.9 million, with the crypto assets being sent to an unknown wallet connected to the infamous crypto mixing tool Tornado Cash.
Among the stolen tokens were PEPE, GALA, USDT, 15,290 ETH valued at $52 million, and 20 million MATIC, totaling $11 million. However, the most substantial theft involved 5,433,752,465,343 SHIB tokens, equivalent to approximately $102.1 million.
However, the situation took a more alarming turn shortly after the hack when crypto analysis firm LookIntoChain reported that the perpetrators had started selling SHIB tokens.
“Note that WazirX exploiter has started selling $SHIB! WazirX exploiter has sold 35B SHIB($618K) and currently holds 5.4T $SHIB($95.45M).” the firm tweeted. However, at press time, the exploiter seemed to have sold all the SHIB, based on data from Etherscan and held about $18.5 million in other tokens.
The sudden flood of SHIB tokens into the market triggered widespread panic among investors, causing SHIB’s price to plummet by just over 10% within an hour of the sales commencing.
Elsewhere, leaders within the SHIB ecosystem quickly moved to reassure panicked investors.
“I sincerely hope all SHIB holders get their money back and Wazir fixes this. The amount of SHIB is significant, but it’s small compared to SHIB’s overall volume. Take this as an opportunity; I definitely will. No panic, we’ve been here before.” Stated LUCIE, Shibarium’s lead marketer.
Notably, the impact extended beyond SHIB holders, as other tokens like PEPE also faced abnormal dumping. LookIntoChain highlighted that the exploiter had sold $230 million worth of assets, including substantial volumes of PEPE tokens.
In response to the breach, the team behind FLOKI, another affected meme token, also addressed their community, confirming that the exploiter had sold off all compromised Floki tokens.
“The exploiter has sold every last cent of FLOKI token he/she got. Not only was the sell fully absorbed by the market, which shows how strong and liquid Floki is as an asset…going forward you can expect zero impact from the hacker as far as Floki is concerned,” the FLOKI team wrote.
They further emphasized ongoing collaboration with WazirX to minimize the impact on affected Floki holders.
At the time of reporting, SHIB was trading at 0.00001778, showing a 7.68% decline over the past 24 hours. Notably, the token displayed signs of stabilization as the market absorbed the massive sale, causing its price to recover by Thursday evening.
