(Bloomberg) -- Hyperliquid, a crypto-derivatives trading platform, suffered its biggest-ever daily outflow as traders rushed to remove funds amid concern that North Korean hackers were trading on the exchange.
Digital wallets associated with the hackers have been trading on Hyperliquid since as early as October, said Taylor Monahan, a security expert working at digital-wallet provider MetaMask. She shared the addresses of the suspected wallets and their activities on the social-media platform X on Monday. Trading is usually a way for North Korean hackers to test potential security bugs on a platform like Hyperliquid, according to Monahan.
“Hyperliquid Labs is aware of reports circulating regarding activity by supposed DPRK addresses,” according to a statement from the core developer team at the exchange. “There has been no DPRK exploit — or any exploit for that matter — of Hyperliquid. All user funds are accounted for.”
Monahan’s posts have triggered a broad debate on social media, with some Hyperliquid supporters criticizing her for creating unnecessary panic. More than $112 million worth of the stablecoin USDC fled the exchange on Monday, according to data compiled by venture-capital fund Hashed on Dune Analytics. The price of HYPE, the exchange’s token, sank 20%, according to tracker CoinGecko.
Hyperliquid is a type of crypto exchange that combines the advantages of both centralized exchanges like Binance and decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. It provides some transparency similar to decentralized exchanges because it is built on its own blockchain. At the same time, it sacrifices some benefits of decentralization — the software to maintain the blockchain ledger is run by a closed group of developers — in order to provide competitively high speeds similar to centralized exchanges.
Hyperliquid has quickly turned into the largest crypto exchange by trading volume in decentralized finance, according to data compiled by user uwusanauwu on Dune Analytics, with a daily average of $8.8 billion in the past week. The platform recently reached a record 24-hour volume of more than $15 billion, according to an X post on Dec. 21.
(Updates with statement from Hyperliquid Labs in third paragraph.)
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