Crime & Security1 min readThe Assayer
Mercado Bitcoin loses $40 million four days after the $6.36 billion Binance incident
The theft of $40 million from Mercado Bitcoin on November 2 is the second loss of this size or larger at a centralised exchange in four days. The first was the Binance incident on October 29, at $6.36 billion. The Mercado Bitcoin loss ranks 10th of the 307 incidents with a known loss in 2026.
Five of those incidents have hit centralised exchanges, for $6.82 billion in total. Binance accounts for most of that. Without it, exchange losses this year total $456.7 million. Known losses across all incidents in 2026 total $8.78 billion, or $2.42 billion without Binance.
What happened
According to the DefiLlama record, attackers compromised a system at Mercado Bitcoin. They transferred more than $40 million in crypto from exchange-associated wallets across various blockchains. The exchange contained the incident and temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while it investigated.
Tether froze more than $4.5 million USDT associated with the theft. Mercado Bitcoin stated that customers would not incur losses and that no customer data was exposed. How the attackers gained access has not been disclosed.
Sources
By The Assayer, the Bitminer.io house byline. Written by AI from the sources above and checked automatically. No person reviewed it before publication. How we work.
