Mercado Bitcoin Hack Was $8 Million Larger Than First Reported, With $48.6 Million Traced Across 10 Blockchains

Blockchain data has pushed the price tag on the Mercado Bitcoin breach higher: CoinDesk reported that hackers drained $48.6 million in stolen assets, up from the $40 million first reported. For PSPs and crypto infrastructure providers, the more interesting detail is operational, not theatrical: the theft appears to have continued for hours after the exchange said it had contained the incident.

1. Hackers drained 36,042 customer deposit addresses on Ethereum between 12:27 and 16:46 UTC on Nov. 2, according to blockchain data platform Bitquery cited by CoinDesk. Mercado Bitcoin said at 12:56 UTC that it had contained the breach, which means the on-chain activity continued for around four hours after that claim.
2. The report said Bitquery traced the stolen assets across 10 blockchains, and the total reached $48.6 million. That is $8 million more than the amount first reported.
3. Mercado Bitcoin pledged to cover all user losses from the hack. Partners including Tether, Circle and Chainalysis helped freeze more than $15 million.
4. CoinDesk also said the investigation uncovered ties to another attack involving wallets believed to belong to the BitMart crypto exchange. That matters because these incidents are not just one-off loss events; they can expose reused infrastructure, shared wallet patterns, or systems used to manage customer deposits.
5. PYMNTS contacted Mercado Bitcoin for comment but had not received a reply at the time of publication.

The attack lands in a period of intensified crypto crime, with the report pointing to the $6 billion hack into the Binance exchange last week, now believed to be the largest financial theft in history. In parallel, Circle has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to preserve technology neutrality under its proposed Regulation Crypto Assets framework and to provide more clarity on permissionless networks, which is another way of saying regulators are being asked to supervise flows that do not sit neatly behind a single control point.