Shillong, September 5: In a significant breach, hackers have siphoned off nearly $41 million from the cryptocurrency gambling platform stake, likely through a stolen private key.
As per IANS, stake acknowledged the security breach on its official communication platform, X (formerly Twitter), revealing that unauthorized transactions occurred from Stake’s Ethereum (ETH)/Binance Smart Chain (BSC) hot wallets. They reassured users, stating, “We are investigating and will get the wallets up as soon as they’re completely re-secured. User funds are safe.”
The company emphasized that other cryptocurrency wallets, such as BTC (Bitcoin), LTC, XRP, EOS, TRX, and more, continue to operate without disruption.
After emptying the wallets, the alleged attacker dispersed the stolen funds among multiple accounts.
Ed Craven, Co-founder of Stake, noted, “Stake keeps a small portion of its crypto reserves in hot wallets at any given moment for these very reasons,” indicating that the losses constitute a relatively small fraction of the total holdings and won’t impact users significantly, as reported by Cointelegraph.
The stolen funds were converted into ether (ETH) and transferred to external wallets. Notably, the attack extended to other blockchains, including BNB Smart Chain (BSC) and Polygon. Beosin, a smart contract auditor, reported losses of an additional $7.8 million on Polygon and $17.8 million on BSC, bringing the total losses to over $41 million.
This incident adds to the growing list of cryptocurrency hacks and exploits, with more than $3.7 billion worth of crypto lost to various security breaches in the past year.
Stake is a cryptocurrency gambling platform offering dice games, Blackjack, Lingo, casino games, and sports betting.