Audit log

Every state-changing event for Zilliqa: moderation decisions on community submissions, plus corrections and updates from the news pipeline. URL-based decisions carry three independent witnesses — the original source, an Internet Archive snapshot taken at submission time, and a Solana memo signed by our publicly-disclosed publisher key.

1. #1publishby system:backfill

   2026-07-22 02:25:21Z
   Score: ? → ? (no score change)
   anchorpending

   chain

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   hash

   HqQ4jyRSH12P…hLuiWchScopysha256 → base58

   verifying row…

   canonical bytes (16580 B) ▸

   {"actor":"system:backfill","investigation_id":"ce7cc7ce-9d4c-4917-970b-fdb83d8d0837","kind":"publish","page_slug":"zilliqa","published_at":"2026-07-22T02:25:20.958Z","sequence_num":1,"snapshot":{"content_type":"investigation","entity_name":"Zilliqa","sections":[{"content":"On July 20, 2026, Zilliqa announced that ZIL tokens had been stolen from a cold wallet belonging to an unnamed exchange partner, and asked all exchanges to temporarily pause ZIL deposits and withdrawals network-wide to prevent the stolen funds from being moved or liquidated. Bitget confirmed it suspended ZIL deposits and withdrawals from July 20, describing the pause publicly as 'wallet maintenance' rather than confirming its own involvement. Neither Zilliqa nor any exchange has publicly named the affected platform; a separate, distinct incident from March 2025 involving similar circumstances also generated speculation linking South Korean exchange Bithumb, which suspended ZIL activity around the same period, but neither Zilliqa nor Bithumb has confirmed Bithumb as the affected partner in either case. As of this writing, Zilliqa has not disclosed the quantity of ZIL stolen, its dollar value, or the identity of the exchange. Zilliqa has stated the blockchain protocol itself was not compromised and that the incident is confined to a partner's custody infrastructure. ZIL's price fell in a range reported between roughly 9% and 15% in the hours following the announcement (accounts vary by outlet and snapshot time), with trading volume reported by one outlet as up nearly 500% to about $47.6 million, before partially recovering.","heading":"July 2026 Exchange-Partner Cold Wallet Theft","severity":"high","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Reports Security Breach: ZIL Tokens Stolen from Exchange Partner's Cold Wallet — CryptoTimes","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/07/20/zilliqa-reports-security-breach-zil-tokens-stolen-from-exchange-partners-cold-wallet/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa halts ZIL transfers after exchange cold wallet theft — crypto.news","type":"news_article","url":"https://crypto.news/zilliqa-halts-zil-transfers-after-exchange-cold-wallet-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Hack Triggers Exchange Freeze as ZIL Theft Confirmed — HokaNews","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.hokanews.com/2026/07/zilliqa-hack-triggers-exchange-freeze.html"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Security Incident: Confirmed ZIL Theft Impact — Cryptonomist","type":"news_article","url":"https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/07/21/zilliqa-security-incident-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Confirms ZIL Stolen From Partner Exchange Cold Wallet — CryptoRank","type":"news_article","url":"https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/052d4-zilliqa-zil-stolen-cold-wallet-exchange"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Exchange Partner's Cold Wallet Breach Triggers ZIL Deposit Freeze — CryptoRank","type":"news_article","url":"https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/2013f-zilliqa-exchange-partners-cold-wallet-breach-triggers-zil-deposit-freeze"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Halts ZIL Transfers After Exchange Partner Reports Cold Wallet Theft — Cryptometer","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptometer.io/news/zilliqa-halts-zil-transfers-after-exchange-partner-reports-cold-wallet-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Suspends ZIL Transfers After Exchange Partner Cold Wallet Theft — Coinpedia","type":"news_article","url":"https://coinpedia.org/crypto-live-news/zilliqa-suspends-zil-transfers-after-exchange-partner-cold-wallet-theft/"}]},{"content":"The central open question in this incident is whether responsibility sits with the third-party exchange's custody operations or with a defect in wallet software maintained by the Zilliqa ecosystem. Multiple outlets reporting on July 20-21, 2026 state plainly that the theft occurred from an exchange partner's cold wallet and that 'the network has not indicated that the blockchain itself has been compromised,' framing this as a custody failure external to Zilliqa. However, one source (CryptoTimes) reports a July 21 update in which Zilliqa allegedly stated it 'found no evidence that the incident was caused by the exchange's wallet management or operational processes' and that 'the root cause appears to be a technical issue affecting transaction signing in a specific set of legacy ZIL1 wallets' — language that, if accurate, would shift at least partial responsibility toward legacy wallet software associated with the Zilliqa protocol rather than the exchange's operational security. This specific claim was not independently corroborated in the other outlets reviewed (crypto.news, Cryptonomist, HokaNews), which describe the root cause as still undetermined and pending a technical post-mortem Zilliqa has promised but not yet published. Given the single-source nature of the 'legacy ZIL1 wallet' attribution and the fact that Zilliqa's own promised full technical report had not been published as of this writing, this claim should be treated as unconfirmed and low-to-medium confidence. Readers should not treat this incident as a confirmed protocol-level Zilliqa failure, nor as a confirmed pure exchange-custody failure — both framings currently exist in public reporting and neither has been definitively substantiated by a released technical post-mortem.","heading":"Blame Attribution: Exchange Custody vs. Zilliqa Wallet Software — Disputed and Unresolved","severity":"medium","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Reports Security Breach: ZIL Tokens Stolen from Exchange Partner's Cold Wallet — CryptoTimes (source of 'legacy ZIL1 wallet' claim)","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/07/20/zilliqa-reports-security-breach-zil-tokens-stolen-from-exchange-partners-cold-wallet/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa halts ZIL transfers after exchange cold wallet theft — crypto.news (root cause undetermined)","type":"news_article","url":"https://crypto.news/zilliqa-halts-zil-transfers-after-exchange-cold-wallet-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Hack Triggers Exchange Freeze as ZIL Theft Confirmed — HokaNews (root cause undetermined)","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.hokanews.com/2026/07/zilliqa-hack-triggers-exchange-freeze.html"}]},{"content":"Separately from the 2026 exchange cold-wallet incident, Zilliqa disclosed on February 6, 2025 that its security team had identified an exploit affecting its own X-Bridge cross-chain infrastructure. According to Zilliqa's official blog, a vulnerability in recently introduced zETH and zBNB token-manager contracts allowed an attacker to mint Zilliqa-bridged versions of ETH and BNB without locking the corresponding underlying assets on the source chains. The attacker minted approximately 531 zETH and 2.2133 zBNB; roughly 123.116 zETH and 2.2133 zBNB were bridged back to Ethereum and BSC respectively, and about 140.378 zETH was sold on ZilSwap for roughly $42,000 in USDT plus a small amount of zWBTC that was also bridged out and liquidated. Zilliqa's team paused the bridge relayer and affected token-manager contracts, deprecated the compromised zETH/zBNB tokens, and deployed replacement contracts that preserved legitimate balances as of specified block heights while excluding the attacker's illegitimately minted tokens. Unlike the 2026 incident, this exploit is unambiguously attributable to a flaw in Zilliqa's own bridge smart contracts, not a third-party exchange. Zilliqa CEO Matt Dyer resigned on April 8, 2025, roughly two months after the exploit; the resignation announcement did not state a reason and Zilliqa's public messaging framed the intervening period around migration to 'Zilliqa 2.0' rather than the bridge incident, so a causal link between the exploit and the resignation has not been established in available reporting.","heading":"February 2025 X-Bridge Exploit — Protocol-Level Vulnerability","severity":"high","sources":[{"credibility":1,"name":"Overview and Mitigation of X-Bridge Exploit — Zilliqa official blog","type":"official","url":"https://blog.zilliqa.com/overview-and-mitigation-of-x-bridge-exploit/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Identifies and Mitigates Exploit on X-Bridge Platform — BitRss","type":"news_article","url":"https://bitrss.com/zilliqa-identifies-and-mitigates-exploit-on-x-bridge-platform-62473"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa X-Bridge Security Incident Update — Zilliqa (X/Twitter)","type":"official","url":"https://x.com/zilliqa/status/1887838559589273840"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa CEO resigns two months after security breach — Cryptopolitan","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptopolitan.com/zilliqa-ceo-resigns-after-security-breach/"}]},{"content":"Zilliqa is a layer-1 blockchain platform founded in Singapore in 2017, originating from blockchain-sharding research at the National University of Singapore. It was co-founded by Amrit Kumar, Yaoqi Jia, Xinshu Dong, and Max Kantelia, and in 2019 became one of the first public blockchains to launch with a sharded architecture in production. Its smart-contract language, Scilla, was designed with formal-verification and 'secure by design' goals in mind. Zilliqa's smart contracts have undergone independent third-party audits, including a ChainSecurity review dating to the project's 2017 token launch and subsequent audits by firms including Hacken. No SEC, DOJ, or comparable regulatory enforcement action against Zilliqa as an entity was identified in available reporting as of this writing, and no credible scam allegations against the core project were found beyond general low-credibility forum speculation (e.g., a Bitcointalk thread titled 'Zilliqa = scam?') that does not constitute a substantiated claim.","heading":"Project Background and Legitimacy Indicators","severity":"low","sources":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa audits — Hacken","type":"research","url":"https://hacken.io/audits/zilliqa/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"What is Zilliqa? — Messari project profile","type":"research","url":"https://messari.io/project/zilliqa/profile"},{"credibility":1,"name":"ChainSecurity Zilliqa smart contract audit report (2017)","type":"official","url":"https://docs.zilliqa.com/ChainSecurity-Zilliqa-Audit.pdf"},{"credibility":3,"name":"Is Zilliqa (ZIL) a Scam? — isthiscoinascam.com","type":"community_report","url":"https://isthiscoinascam.com/check/zilliqa"}]}],"sources_used":[{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Reports Security Breach: ZIL Tokens Stolen from Exchange Partner's Cold Wallet — CryptoTimes","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/07/20/zilliqa-reports-security-breach-zil-tokens-stolen-from-exchange-partners-cold-wallet/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa halts ZIL transfers after exchange cold wallet theft — crypto.news","type":"news_article","url":"https://crypto.news/zilliqa-halts-zil-transfers-after-exchange-cold-wallet-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Hack Triggers Exchange Freeze as ZIL Theft Confirmed — HokaNews","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.hokanews.com/2026/07/zilliqa-hack-triggers-exchange-freeze.html"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Security Incident: Confirmed ZIL Theft Impact — Cryptonomist","type":"news_article","url":"https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/07/21/zilliqa-security-incident-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Confirms ZIL Stolen From Partner Exchange Cold Wallet — CryptoRank","type":"news_article","url":"https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/052d4-zilliqa-zil-stolen-cold-wallet-exchange"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Exchange Partner's Cold Wallet Breach Triggers ZIL Deposit Freeze — CryptoRank","type":"news_article","url":"https://cryptorank.io/news/feed/2013f-zilliqa-exchange-partners-cold-wallet-breach-triggers-zil-deposit-freeze"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Halts ZIL Transfers After Exchange Partner Reports Cold Wallet Theft — Cryptometer","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptometer.io/news/zilliqa-halts-zil-transfers-after-exchange-partner-reports-cold-wallet-theft/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Suspends ZIL Transfers After Exchange Partner Cold Wallet Theft — Coinpedia","type":"news_article","url":"https://coinpedia.org/crypto-live-news/zilliqa-suspends-zil-transfers-after-exchange-partner-cold-wallet-theft/"},{"credibility":1,"name":"Overview and Mitigation of X-Bridge Exploit — Zilliqa official blog","type":"official","url":"https://blog.zilliqa.com/overview-and-mitigation-of-x-bridge-exploit/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa Identifies and Mitigates Exploit on X-Bridge Platform — BitRss","type":"news_article","url":"https://bitrss.com/zilliqa-identifies-and-mitigates-exploit-on-x-bridge-platform-62473"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa X-Bridge Security Incident Update — Zilliqa (X/Twitter)","type":"official","url":"https://x.com/zilliqa/status/1887838559589273840"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa CEO resigns two months after security breach — Cryptopolitan","type":"news_article","url":"https://www.cryptopolitan.com/zilliqa-ceo-resigns-after-security-breach/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"Zilliqa audits — Hacken","type":"research","url":"https://hacken.io/audits/zilliqa/"},{"credibility":2,"name":"What is Zilliqa? — Messari project profile","type":"research","url":"https://messari.io/project/zilliqa/profile"},{"credibility":1,"name":"ChainSecurity Zilliqa smart contract audit report (2017)","type":"official","url":"https://docs.zilliqa.com/ChainSecurity-Zilliqa-Audit.pdf"},{"credibility":3,"name":"Is Zilliqa (ZIL) a Scam? — isthiscoinascam.com","type":"community_report","url":"https://isthiscoinascam.com/check/zilliqa"}],"summary":"Zilliqa is a Singapore-founded, sharded layer-1 blockchain launched in 2017 out of National University of Singapore research, with a track record of independent smart-contract audits and no history of SEC or DOJ enforcement action against the project itself. Its trust profile is weighed down by two distinct security incidents: a February 2025 exploit of Zilliqa's own X-Bridge token-manager contracts (protocol-level fault, roughly $42,000 realized loss) and a July 2026 theft of ZIL tokens from an exchange partner's cold wallet, which Zilliqa's own preliminary findings attribute to a technical flaw in legacy ZIL1 wallet transaction-signing rather than to the exchange's custody practices — a claim that as of this writing is corroborated by only one secondary source and remains unconfirmed by Zilliqa's promised full post-mortem.","timeline":[{"date":"2017","event":"Zilliqa founded in Singapore, emerging from National University of Singapore blockchain-sharding research; ChainSecurity publishes an initial smart-contract audit around the token launch period.","source":"ChainSecurity Zilliqa Audit Report","source_url":"https://docs.zilliqa.com/ChainSecurity-Zilliqa-Audit.pdf"},{"date":"2019","event":"Zilliqa mainnet becomes one of the first public blockchains to launch in production with a sharded architecture.","source":"Messari project profile","source_url":"https://messari.io/project/zilliqa/profile"},{"date":"2025-02-06","event":"X-Bridge token-manager contract vulnerability exploited, allowing an attacker to mint zETH/zBNB without locking underlying assets; roughly $42,000 realized via a ZilSwap sale before mitigation.","source":"Zilliqa official blog","source_url":"https://blog.zilliqa.com/overview-and-mitigation-of-x-bridge-exploit/"},{"date":"2025-04-08","event":"Zilliqa CEO Matt Dyer resigns; no explicit reason given, timing following the X-Bridge exploit by roughly two months.","source":"Cryptopolitan","source_url":"https://www.cryptopolitan.com/zilliqa-ceo-resigns-after-security-breach/"},{"date":"2026-07-20","event":"Zilliqa announces ZIL tokens stolen from an unnamed exchange partner's cold wallet; requests all exchanges pause ZIL deposits/withdrawals. Bitget confirms a suspension. ZIL price falls (reports range roughly 9%-15%).","source":"CryptoTimes / crypto.news / HokaNews","source_url":"https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/07/20/zilliqa-reports-security-breach-zil-tokens-stolen-from-exchange-partners-cold-wallet/"},{"date":"2026-07-21","event":"WuBlockchain reports confirmation of the ZIL theft; per one outlet, Zilliqa states preliminary findings point to a legacy ZIL1 wallet transaction-signing issue rather than exchange operational failure, though this remains unconfirmed by a formal post-mortem and uncorroborated by other outlets.","source":"CryptoTimes / Cryptonomist","source_url":"https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2026/07/21/zilliqa-security-incident-theft/"}]},"v":1}

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