Mercado Bitcoin Halts Withdrawals After $46 Million Leaves Exchange Wallets

Mercado Bitcoin, widely described in trade press as Brazil's largest crypto exchange, confirmed a cyberattack on one of its systems on Monday, November 2, 2026, and suspended all deposits and withdrawals until further notice. According to reporting from Cointelegraph, crypto assets worth more than $46 million flowed out of the exchange's wallets during the incident. Mercado Bitcoin says its customers have not been harmed, but anyone holding a balance there still cannot access their funds for now.

In a statement posted on X, the exchange said the incident was detected in the early hours of the morning and contained quickly. It reported no data leak and said customer funds were not affected. The company described the payment halt as a precaution while its teams investigate, trace the drained assets, and work with authorities. A spokesperson repeated to Cointelegraph that customers had suffered no losses and that no data had been exposed. The company has not named an attack method, and no group has been linked to it.

According to Cointelegraph's reporting, based on blockchain analysis by security firms, the picture late Monday afternoon looked like this: stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle had frozen about $6.2 million tied to the incident. Roughly $20 million had been moved to newly created wallets. More than $20 million remained on addresses Mercado Bitcoin has linked to the attack, including all 106 bitcoin involved. It has not been publicly established whether the drained funds came from the exchange's own reserves or from customer deposit addresses, which means the company's promise that customers won't be harmed is, for now, a pledge to cover any losses itself rather than confirmation that no customer funds were touched.

Dickson Wu, a senior security engineer at the auditing firm CertiK, offered an early reconstruction of the attack, as quoted by Cointelegraph. He said attackers first moved across eight smaller blockchains, including Base, Optimism and Arbitrum, over roughly four hours before targeting the exchange's central hot wallets, which sit on internet-connected systems for fast withdrawals. Security firms say the attack used ordinary transfers rather than a smart-contract flaw. One detail from CertiK's analysis stands out: after the hot wallets were breached, small amounts were moved from 27,160 separate addresses into a single address, which Wu says suggests the attacker may also be able to move funds out of individual customer deposit addresses. Cointelegraph also reported that fund movements linked to the incident continued for hours after the suspension was announced, which does not match the description of a quickly contained breach, though it does not by itself prove any customer lost money.

Tether and Circle were able to freeze about $6.2 million because their stablecoins include a freeze function on flagged addresses. Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies have no such mechanism, leaving tracing and cooperation from other exchanges as the main tools to recover the rest.

This is the second major exchange attack within a week. Binance reported an attack on its hot wallets the previous Thursday in which, according to Cointelegraph, $6.3 billion in assets were drained; Binance suspended withdrawals, pledged to cover losses, and said by Sunday it had replenished 95 percent of the stolen assets. Mercado Bitcoin is far smaller, with Cointelegraph noting it counted 4.5 million users in July, around the time Tether announced a $20 million stake in the company. Separately, another Tether-backed exchange, Orionx of Chile, announced in September it would close after a review found more than $7 million in customer assets had ended up outside its control.

Who this affects

This directly concerns customers with balances held at Mercado Bitcoin, whose withdrawals are frozen until the exchange lifts the suspension. Those without an account there are not affected by the halt itself. Because it remains unclear whether deposit addresses or customer data were compromised, messages claiming to be from the exchange about refunds or account checks should be treated with caution, since no exchange asks for passwords or recovery phrases.

As our site's personal finance writer often notes when covering developments like this, incidents involving exchanges and digital assets tend to move quickly and the details can change within hours, which is why households are encouraged to follow only official, verified channels rather than forwarded links or screenshots.

Whether Mercado Bitcoin confirms a final loss figure, and when withdrawals resume, was not known at the time this was reported. Anyone holding crypto assets on any exchange, in Brazil or elsewhere, may want to review how their holdings are split between exchange balances and self-held wallets, and discuss their specific situation with a licensed financial professional before making any decisions.

Source: CryptoTicker.io

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