BitMart hot wallets (November 2026) hack — November 2026
Incident facts
| Date of incident | |
|---|---|
| Publicly disclosed | November 3, 2026 |
| Target type | Centralised exchange |
| Loss | $424,000Price at time of incident |
| Method | Other or undisclosedWallets tied to the exchange sent their balances to the same address that drained Mercado Bitcoin less than an hour later; BitMart has not said how the attacker got access |
| Chains | Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Other |
| Outcome | Unresolved |
What happened
In the early hours of 2 November 2026 wallets tied to the crypto exchange BitMart were emptied on Base, Arbitrum, Optimism and five smaller chains, starting 53 minutes before the same attacker began draining Mercado Bitcoin. BitMart founder Sheldon Xia confirmed on 3 November that the exchange had been hacked the day before, called the amount small without giving a figure, and said the preliminary investigation pointed to the group behind the Mercado Bitcoin attack.
Bitquery counts about $424,000 taken from wallets tied to BitMart, $298,000 of it from three wallets on Base, Arbitrum and Optimism; its address labels mark the Arbitrum and Optimism wallets as BitMart hot wallets. The first published estimate, about $391,000 on those three chains, is the low end here. The receiving address is the one that took the Mercado Bitcoin funds, which is the link both Bitquery and BitMart point to. No group has been named.
The attack came while BitMart was winding down: it had announced in July that it would end trading on 26 August and close in January 2027, and it published a restructuring proposal for users on 2 November. Xia said the exchange had kept only a core team and that its security team was severely understaffed. BitMart has not said how the attacker got in or whether the funds belonged to customers, and nothing has been reported frozen or returned.
Sources
- Sheldon Xia, BitMart founder, on X (3 November 2026)Primary · retrieved 2026-11-05
- Bitquery investigation, BitMart section (November 2026)Secondary · retrieved 2026-11-05
- Cointelegraph (4 November 2026)Secondary · retrieved 2026-11-05
Changes to this entry
- Recorded at Bitquery’s ~$424k across eight chains; the first ~$391k estimate (three chains) is the low end. BitMart confirmed the hack but gave no figure — provisional, re-check.
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