elliptic

eXch (exch.cx) was a no-KYC instant cryptocurrency swap service operating from 2014 until its forced shutdown in May 2025. Registered in Belize under the name Private Project Facilitators LTD, the platform processed an estimated $1.9 billion in total volume, deliberately advertising its absence of anti-money laundering controls on criminal underground forums. German federal law enforcement seized approximately $38 million in cryptocurrency assets and 8 terabytes of data from the platform in April 2025, following evidence linking eXch to laundering roughly $200 million of funds stolen in the $1.46 billion Bybit hack carried out by North Korea's Lazarus Group.

Mixin Network is a Hong Kong-based cross-chain Layer 2 protocol that suffered one of the largest cryptocurrency hacks of 2023, losing approximately $200 million when its cloud service provider's database was compromised on September 23, 2023. The hack exposed a fundamental contradiction in Mixin's self-described decentralized architecture: the majority of user funds were held in hot wallets backed by a centralized cloud database. As of early 2026, the majority of stolen assets remain unrecovered, with the attacker beginning to launder funds through Tornado Cash.

CoinEx is a centralized cryptocurrency exchange that suffered a major hot wallet breach on September 12, 2023, with losses estimated between $54 million and $70 million across multiple blockchains. On-chain investigators ZachXBT and Elliptic attributed the attack to the Lazarus Group (TraderTraitor), a North Korean state-sponsored threat actor, based on wallet address overlap with the contemporaneous Stake.com hack. Stolen proceeds were subsequently laundered in part through the Sinbad Bitcoin mixer, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury's OFAC on November 29, 2023.

WazirX is an Indian cryptocurrency exchange co-founded in 2018 by Nischal Shetty, Sameer Mhatre, and Siddharth Menon that suffered the largest crypto hack in Indian history on July 18, 2024, when approximately $234.9 million in user assets were stolen from a Gnosis Safe multisig wallet via a sophisticated supply-chain-style attack attributed by Elliptic, ZachXBT, and a joint US-Japan-South Korea government statement to North Korea's Lazarus Group. The hack triggered suspension of all withdrawals, a Singapore court-supervised restructuring process in which users are expected to recover approximately 55% of their assets, and ongoing regulatory and law enforcement scrutiny in India.

CoinsPaid is an Estonia-based cryptocurrency payment processor founded by Max Krupyshev that was targeted in two major security breaches: a $37.3 million hack in July 2023 attributed by the company and the FBI to North Korea's Lazarus Group (achieved via a sophisticated social engineering campaign using fake job offers), and a second breach in January 2024 resulting in approximately $7.5 million in losses. Despite the company's stated transparency and rapid operational recovery, the consecutive incidents raise significant concerns about its security posture and its status as a repeated high-value target for state-sponsored threat actors.