trade.io Announces Hard Fork After $8 Million Worth of Crypto Stolen From Bank-Secured Cold Storage

Swiss crypto exchange trade.io reported on October 20th that $8 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency was stolen from its cold storage devices by hackers. It is at this point unclear how the funds were withdrawn. The cold storage devices were kept locked in bank safety deposit boxes. Following the attack, trade.io management has decided to fork the exchange’s TIO token into Trade Token X (TIOx). The fork is scheduled to take place on October 24th, with TIOx trading beginning on October 31st exclusively on the trade.io exchange.

Attack Under Investigation

According to trade.io’s initial Medium post:

“Around 08:40 EST, our security team was alerted to a large transaction from one of our wallets held in cold storage. As they investigated, they started noticing some irregular trading activity in TIO pairs on Bancor & Kucoin. We alerted both Bancor & Kucoin accordingly to disable any deposits & withdrawals, and did the same on trade.io. TIO Deposits & Withdrawals will be disabled on both Kucoin & trade.io until further notice, and TIO will no longer be listed on Bancor. Additionally, TIO trading has been disabled on trade.io exchange until further notice.”

trade.io’s investigation revealed that 50 million TIO tokens were taken from the exchange’s cold storage liquidity pool. Of that 50 million, 1.3 million tokens were transferred to Bancor and Kucoin. The stolen funds are worth approximately $8 million in total. Bancor and Kucoin are partnering with trade.io in the investigation.

“Unfortunately, while this is an extremely strange situation, breaches of cold storage is not unprecedented [sic] even when following security protocol to a ‘T’.”

trade.io reports using industry recommended cold storage hardware kept in safety deposit boxes in banks. The safety deposit boxes are confirmed to have not been compromised.

Suggested Reading : Get your very own cold storage hardware wallet.

TIO Forks to TIOx

trade.io announced today that they have decided to fork the TIO token into TIOx, making the traceable 50 million hacked TIO worthless, while maintaining the value of the remaining tokens owned by legitimate holders. Participants in the liquidity pool are promised to not be affected by the attack, and the ability to enter or leave the pool will continue normally.

A total of 223 million TIOx tokens are planned to be airdropped into trade.io exchange accounts and user wallets tomorrow, October 24th. TIO token holders with funds kept on HitBTC or gate.io will not automatically be receiving the airdrop and should contact [email protected] immediately. Once the dust settles after the airdrop, TIOx will open for trading on October 31st.

For their part, trade.io seems confident that the hack and the ensuing fork will not slow them down:

“It’s obvious that trade.io is now a major focal point of competitors and those attempting to destroy the movement that is on the ground floor, and we guarantee you we will not bow down to their actions. We have the strongest community in crypto and we assure you we will wind up stronger as a result of actions like these and any such attacks in the future.”