India’s CoinDCX Confirms $16 Million Loss Days After CEO Called It a ‘False Alarm’
The Mumbai-based exchange says 15.99 million USDT was drained from wallets it retired after last year’s $44 million hack, bringing its combined losses to nearly $60 million—and it’s absorbing the hit.
Indian crypto exchange CoinDCX has admitted it lost about $16 million in an attack on its wallet infrastructure, reversing its co-founder’s earlier insistence that reports of a breach were a “false alarm.”
In a blog post , the Mumbai-based exchange said 15.99 million USDT was drained and that it has absorbed the loss itself, stressing that customer funds remain safe.
The money moved on the Tron network on Oct. 21, and the company traced the incident to a failure in an internal process meant to sweep customer deposits out of wallets it had retired after a far larger hack last year .
The disclosure caps an awkward few days for the exchange. When blockchain researchers and the Arkham tracker first flagged roughly $16 million in suspicious outflows, CEO Sumit Gupta pushed back on X , writing that CoinDCX’s wallets were “not breached” and that the flagged addresses had been compromised back in July 2025, making the activity look like “a false alarm.”
On-chain investigator ZachXBT disputed that account , noting the wallet in question had still been sweeping user deposits into CoinDCX’s current hot wallet as recently as April and May, and he urged customers to withdraw their assets.
They publicly and privately denied a theft of its assets occurred meaning they straight up lied or are negligently incompetent.
Later they disclosed the $16M theft and… pic.twitter.com/uEmtogPonq
The loss compounds a tumultuous stretch for one of India’s largest exchanges. CoinDCX suffered a roughly $44 million hack in July 2025 that it blamed on a server breach, prompting a bounty hunt for the stolen funds and, later, the arrest of an employee over the incident.
Together, the two episodes bring the exchange’s losses to nearly $60 million.
The retired wallets at the center of the new loss were themselves a legacy of that earlier breach, addresses the exchange had stopped using but which kept receiving residual deposits. The failure of an automated transfer system to clear them out left the funds exposed.
CoinDCX has weathered other turbulence this year. The exchange faced fraud and impersonation-scam allegations that drew a police probe, while its founder denied reports of acquisition talks with Coinbase following the 2025 hack. Coinbase has separately moved to expand across South Asia and the Middle East.
The exchange said it would share further details as its investigation continues, and reiterated that user balances are unaffected.
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