India's largest crypto exchange absorbs $16 million loss from internal process failure tied to retired wallet

“This wallet belongs to our old operational wallet infrastructure, which was compromised during the security incident we reported on July 19, 2025, and was deprecated as a result,” CoinDCX said.

The post explained that some users mistakenly continued to deposit funds into the deprecated, or retired, addresses even after the exchange deprecated them following the 2025 hack. CoinDCX credited those users’ portfolios the moment the funds reached the deprecated wallet.

A secondary service, which the exchange calls sweeping, was meant to then move the funds from the deprecated address into the primary CoinDCX wallet.

However, that process failed for a particular period, causing deposits to accumulate in the deprecated address.

“This led to a loss of 15.99 million USDT which was absorbed by the company,” it said. The blog post does not call it a hack and does not say who was behind the irregular fund movement or how it happened.

CoinDesk has reached out to CoinDCX to ask whether it means the old, retired addresses were hacked again.

“We want to reiterate that all user funds remain safe in secure, segregated cold wallets, protected by multi-layer custody and offline security controls,” the exchange said. Cold wallets are kept offline by design.