Crypto exchange BitMart has confirmed a fresh hack, admitting that attackers drained about $391,000 from its wallets on 2 November 2026 — the same day Brazil’s largest crypto exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, lost nearly $49 million in one of the biggest heists of the year. Founder Sheldon Xia revealed the breach in a post on X on 3 November, describing it as a small-scale incident involving a limited amount of stolen funds.
What makes the timing remarkable is the sequence. On-chain investigators say the attackers hit BitMart’s wallets roughly 53 minutes before they struck Mercado Bitcoin — a same-day, two-continent operation that points to one group behind both incidents. The link rests on blockchain data rather than formal attribution, so investigators describe it as a working theory for now.
What happened on 2 November
Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery traced about $391,000 in suspicious outflows from wallets mostly linked to BitMart, spread across three Ethereum layer-2 networks: Base, Arbitrum and Optimism. Other estimates put the loss lower, at around $298,000, because different analysts counted different wallets — and investigators stress that wallet labels alone do not prove ownership.
Xia said the team moved quickly to investigate and tightened security. One earlier report noted the security team had been understaffed during the exchange’s restructuring. BitMart has not published its own loss figure, has not said whether customer balances were affected, and has not explained how the attackers got into its wallets.
The 53-minute gap and the Mercado Bitcoin connection
Mercado Bitcoin reported a security incident on 2 November affecting assets valued at roughly $38 million by its own estimate, with about $11 million frozen with help from industry partners. Analytics firm Chainalysis separately estimated the stolen assets at approximately $49 million and said it helped coordinate freezes of nearly $10 million.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino confirmed that the issuer froze more than 4.5 million USDT linked to the incident. Mercado Bitcoin said customers would not bear the losses and that the incident caused no data breach. The connection between the two attacks remains preliminary: a common attacker has not yet been confirmed through a full forensic investigation.
BitMart’s restructuring and the $319.5 million hole
The timing is awkward for BitMart. The exchange announced its wind-down on 26 July 2026 and halted all trading by 26 August. It is now in court-supervised restructuring, with full closure set for 31 January 2027.
Restructuring documents note a projected shortfall of $319.5 million, based on 2021 pricing, linked in part to its December 2021 hack that drained hot wallets on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain — contemporaneous estimates of that attack were around $150 million to $200 million. At $391,000, the new breach is a rounding error next to the $319.5 million hole, but it is another credibility blow while the exchange seeks court approval for its repayment plan.
2026 is already crypto’s worst year on record
Tracking of exploits puts the running 2026 theft total at an estimated $8.776 billion — more than three times the $2.715 billion recorded in 2025 and the worst year on record by a wide margin. The BitMart and Mercado Bitcoin incidents push that figure higher still.
Crypto heists have been a recurring theme this year; earlier, a Polymarket hack drained $2.7 million in a single hour. For Pakistani users watching crypto prices in Pakistan, the episode is a reminder that even established exchanges can fail at the basics.
Cryptonews.net and The Cryptonomist reported the details of the attacks; on-chain figures come from Bitquery and Chainalysis.
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