Brazil's Biggest Bitcoin Exchange Says It Will Refund Users After a $40 Million Hack

In brief

• Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil's largest crypto exchange, says its customers won't bear the cost of a hack that hit its systems on November 2.
• Loss estimates differ: the exchange says about $38 million, Hypernative more than $40 million, Arkham at least $46 million and Chainalysis about $49 million.
• Deposits and withdrawals remain suspended with no restart date, days after a $6 billion theft at Binance that the FBI blamed on North Korea.

Brazil's largest crypto exchange says its users won't pay for its hack. Mercado Bitcoin, which lost tens of millions of dollars on Monday, says the losses are its problem, not its customers'.

An exchange holds your coins the way a bank holds your cash, and when one gets robbed, the customers are often the ones left waiting to see what they get back.

The exchange spotted a breach early on November 2 and froze deposits and withdrawals. “We identified and quickly contained a security incident in one of our systems early this morning,” Mercado Bitcoin said in a Portuguese-language statement on X. “As a preventive protection measure, deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended.”

It said no customer lost money and no data leaked. It has not said how the attackers got in.