Mercado Bitcoin says no customer losses after Hypernative-linked theft of $40 million in crypto assets

Brazil’s largest crypto exchange says clients were not financially hit and no personal data leak was recorded after attackers moved stolen funds across multiple blockchains. For PSPs and exchanges, the useful part is not the headline number alone, but the settlement trail: once stolen assets are split across chains, freezing and recovery turn into a race.

1. Analysts at Hypernative say the attackers spread the stolen funds across newly created addresses on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, BNB Smart Chain and Stellar. The haul included 106 bitcoins, 2852 ether, 10 700 SOL, 1,7 млн TRX, and more than 200 other tokens.
2. Mercado Bitcoin said its customers did not suffer financial losses and that it had not recorded any personal data exposure. The exchange did not disclose the total amount stolen.
3. Tether, the issuer of USDT, said it had blocked $4,5 million connected to the incident. That matters operationally: even when funds move fast, stablecoin issuers can still cut off part of the trail if they see it early enough.
4. Market activity on Mercado Bitcoin spiked during the second round of Brazil’s presidential election at the end of October. USDT trading volume rose almost 800% from the previous week and more than tripled the average of the previous four Sundays, while bitcoin turnover on the platform jumped 865% week on week.
5. The incident came amid a run of large crypto-platform attacks: on 30 October, Binance said more than $6,3 billion in crypto assets were stolen, and hackers also took at least $2,73 million from 737 customer accounts at prediction-market platform Polymarket after a third-party software vendor was compromised.