CoinDCX announces recovery bounty programme after hack; offers up to $11 million in reward

CoinDCX co-founders Neeraj Khandelwal and Sumit Gupta.

Crypto exchange CoinDCX announced a recovery bounty programme on July 21, after it lost $44.2 million worth of assets in a cyber attack over the weekend.

The July 19 hack impacted one of its internal operational accounts used for liquidity provisioning, and user funds were safe, the company had said.

Now, it has promised up to 25 percent of any recovered funds to the “individuals or teams who can help trace and retrieve the stolen crypto, but more importantly assist in the identification and conviction of those involved”.

“These past few days have been tough. One of our operational accounts was targeted in a cyberattack. But this isn’t just about the stolen assets. It’s about what all of us in Web3 are building together: freedom, transparency and trust.

Hence, we are doing what we believe is the right thing to do – announcing the CoinDCX Recovery Bounty Program with a simple intention: to rally our ecosystem against cybercrime,” the exchange said in a blog post.

Also read: Crypto exchange CoinDCX hit by cyberattack, $44 million drained from internal operational account

“We want to be upfront – the loss was from our own treasury, and we’ve already absorbed it through our reserves. CoinDCX remains financially strong and fully operational. Our wallet systems were never compromised, but we’ve still gone deeper – tightening security and redesigning parts of our infrastructure to ensure this never happens again,” the post added.

The programme is open to ethical hackers, white-hat researchers and anyone committed to making crypto safer, it said. Up to $11 million will be offered in rewards if the assets are identified and recovered.

After the hack, CoinDCX co-founder and CEO Sumit Gupta said on the X platform, “The incident was quickly contained by isolating the affected operational account. Since our operational accounts are segregated from customer wallets, the exposure is only limited to this specific account and is being fully absorbed by us - from our own treasury reserves. Our internal security and operations teams have been working through the day along with leading cybersecurity partners to investigate the matter, patch any vulnerabilities and trace the movement of funds."