Overview
- BitMart says about $391,000 was drained from wallets on Base, Arbitrum and Optimism on November 2, and founder Sheldon Xia publicly confirmed the incident the following day.
- Blockchain analytics firms traced the outflows to attacker-controlled addresses that received funds roughly 53 minutes before a much larger Mercado Bitcoin exploit on the same day.
- Mercado Bitcoin reported about $38 million in affected assets with roughly $11 million blocked and Chainalysis estimated the theft at about $49 million while helping to freeze nearly $10 million.
- The exchange has been in a court-supervised wind-down since halting trading in August and its leadership says a severely understaffed security team has reduced its ability to defend remaining assets.
- Any stolen funds directly cut the pool available for the repayment plan, so BitMart, advisers Alvarez & Marsal and investigators are continuing forensic tracing and legal work to recover assets and protect creditor payouts.