So far, in this month alone, the news of exchanges getting hacked is almost a daily occurrence. When an exchange gets hacked, the hot wallet is always the main target and it is where the most damage is done. Rarely has the news of an exchange’s Cold wallet getting hacked, surfaced. Trade.IO, a Swiss-based exchange has however released an announcement that its Cold Storage Wallet has lost about 50 million TIO tokens(its Native Token).
Trade.IO May Have Lied
Recently, the Trade.IO team, via an official blog post, claimed that it uses a secured cold storage wallet kept in a bank vault. However, recent events might have proven this to be untrue.
The exchange, however, released a statement saying that:
“It’s obvious that Trade.IO is now a major focal point of competitors and those attempting to destroy the movement that is on the ground floor, and we guarantee you we will not bow down to their actions. We have the strongest community in crypto and we assure you we will wind up stronger as a result of actions like these and any such attacks in the future.”
Trading of TIO Tokens Halted
In light of the compromised cold wallet storage, Trade.IO has issued a warning to freeze the trading of its native tokens on other exchanges.
The report made it known that the wallet hack was noticed by the Exchange between yesterday 21-Oct and today. Since then about 50 million tokens worth as much as $12.5 million were moved. So also an estimate of at least a million tokens has been sold on various exchanges — most especially KuCoin and Bancor
Since the news of it hacking got released, TIO has lost about 60% of its value— it moved from around $0.25 down to $0.15. Since then trading of the token has been suspended.
The coin which had an ICO sales of about $51 million in January, and is still looking to book in about $135 million in sales has been facing a hard time before the news of the hack broke.
The Trade.IO team recently released a report of a likely hard fork. The details of the hard fork have not yet been announced, but one thing is almost certain, the hard fork will be used as an avenue to erase the history of the hacked token.