CoinBene, a relatively large cryptocurrency exchange, has recently entered an unannounced maintenance period at about the same time users noticed massive amounts of crypto were being transferred out of its wallets, leading to suspicions it was hacked.
On Twitter, the cryptocurrency exchange’s official account has responded to users who asked what was going on for their deposits to be pending for hours, by claiming they’re performing upgrades to better serve their users.
In order to enhance the user experience, CoinBene upgraded the platform wallet on March 26, 2019.
During maintenance, it will affect related operations such as deposit and withdraw, trading will not be affected.— CoinBene Global (@CoinBene) March 26, 2019
In a subsequent tweet, the cryptocurrency exchange tells the users deposits and withdrawals will be automatically processed once the maintenance period is over, and adds that the “completion time of the maintenance will be notified separately.”
Nick Saponaro, the CIO of blockchain firm Diviproject, has however suggested that a large hack may have actually taken place, as blockchain data seems to show up to $40 million worth of ERC-20 tokens have left its wallets.
Commenting Saponaro’s tweet, another user revealed the funds are being moved to a wallet market as a “cold wallet” by a user on Etherscan. The same user, he claims, has marked other wallets as “marketing” and “team,” hinting these could be internal tractions.
Responding to a user who told CoinBene the exchange seems to have been hacked on Twitter, the crypto exchange’s official account merely asked how it could help the user, who then pointed out the large transactions and the frozen deposits and withdrawals. CoinBene hasn’t so far responded.
Deposit and withdrawal are closed, last minute you started to call it maintenance. People talking about your hacked issue with this photo. I guess you need help more than me right now pic.twitter.com/7oVhOAvCd8
— My_Dream (@estamina04) March 26, 2019
In the user’s tweet we can see nearly 370 million Maximine Coins (XMX) have left CoinBene’s wallets. Notably, the little-known cryptocurrency has seen its price rise by over 700% this month, with 99% of the trading volume being on CoinBene, even though it’s listed on Livecoins and HitBTC.
Source:CoinGecko
As far as fundamentals go, CCN reports that MXM is a coin set to be used on a cloud-based mining pool service, in which users need MXM coins to have hashing power. The cryptocurrency’s GitHub repository has had one activity recently, in April of last year.
Curiously, cryptocurrency exchange BitForex was reportedly going to list MXM trading pairs on its platform today, March 26. The CoinBene situation notably comes on the same day crypto exchange DragonEx was hacked.
