CoinSwitch co-founder Ashish Singhal has alleged that WazirX moved nearly $73.63 million in users’ cryptocurrency assets to global exchanges Bybit and KuCoin after it had suffered a major cyber attack in July.
“By scanning through these wallets, we have observed a large chunk of Wazirx crypto has been moved to exchanges such as Bybit and Kucoin post the incident. As of now, we have identified the movement of $72.13 million worth of crypto to Bybit and $1.5-million funds to Kucoin,” Singhal said. “We are pursuing legal action against WazirX to recover our funds. So, it is important for us to understand the information they have shared deeply.”
In response, a spokesperson from WazirX said in a statement, “CSK (CoinSwitch) has made a dashboard of our wallet addresses, but their users have been asking for CSK’s real time proof of reserve and all the wallet addresses of CSK and they have not provided anything where people can track in real-time. We have gone ahead and done the same for tracking real time wallets of WazirX. It shows how easy it is to build a dashboard but unfortunately they themselves haven’t built it for their customers who have been demanding for many years now,”
The development comes at a time when WazirX is facing legal action from rival CoinSwitch for freezing its funds in the exchange after the Rs 2,000-crore hack, and to recover locked funds. In a post on X, Singhal flagged the transfer of $72.13 million to Bybit and $1.5 million to KuCoin from WazirX.
On July 18, WazirX faced a cyber attack due to a compromised multisig wallet, which wiped out 45% of its users’ assets. WazirX is the largest crypto exchange in India with around 33% of the country’s crypto users holding accounts and balances with the platform.
After the attack, the crypto exchange had suspended customer withdrawals until its restructuring plan was approved by creditors and the High Court of Singapore. WazirX co-founder Nischal Shetty and his financial advisors had said customers are unlikely to recover more than 57% of their funds, incurring a potential loss of around Rs 850 crore.
In September, the Singapore court granted a four-month moratorium to WazirX for restructuring its business without worrying about legal proceedings. As part of the Singapore court’s conditions for approving the moratorium, WazirX recently released over 240,000 wallet addresses in a court affidavit filed by its parent Zettai Pte.
CoinSwitch has created a dashboard to help users track and manage their funds linked to these wallet addresses. It has sued WazirX to reclaim 2% of its funds frozen after the cyber attack.
