CoinDCX’s $16 million loss revives uncomfortable memories of FTX and Celsius

CoinDCX confirmed a loss of roughly $16 million USDT three days after its CEO, Sumit Gupta, disputed reports of a new wallet breach, calling them a false alarm.

It had acknowledged unspecified operational losses from a failed sweeping process on the afternoon of Oct. 22, so the reversal came in two steps, and the full figure arrived Oct. 25.

CoinDCX says it absorbed the loss and that customer balances were unaffected. The sequence, confident public reassurance followed by a confirmed problem, recalls four 2022 collapses whose executives' statements were later tested in court.

CoinDCX's Oct. 25 incident update says it spotted unusual activity on Oct. 21 and learned of irregular fund movements through blockchain data and community reports the next day.

Some customers kept sending deposits to addresses deprecated since the July 2025 breach. CoinDCX credited those deposits immediately, and the automated service that moves them to current wallets stopped working for an unspecified period, leaving the accumulated deposits exposed.

The exchange says trading and withdrawals continued as normal.

Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery counted 40 Tron wallets tied to the transfers on Oct. 23, with $15.8 million traced to one deposit address and $2.2 million reportedly frozen by Tether.

One address had received 88 deposits since March 2026, and about $9.6 million moved on to addresses associated with Binance, OKX, and Gate.

Gupta's first statement and the later account can coexist, since he contested a breach of current wallets and the loss came through deprecated infrastructure. The gap is in how fully the first message described a system that was crediting deposits to those addresses.

Open points include when the sweeping service failed, how long deposits sat exposed, how the attacker gained control, and whether independent evidence supports the claim that every customer liability stayed covered.

The Oct. 25 statement includes an incident update and omits an audited post-incident balance sheet.

On Nov. 7, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried posted that FTX's assets were fine and sufficient to cover customer holdings.

The CFTC's December 2022 complaint preserved the post and described an internal scramble to raise billions of dollars.

Withdrawals effectively stopped on Nov. 8 once about $6 billion in net withdrawals had left over 72 hours, and FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11. Customer assets had been diverted to Alameda Research.

A jury convicted Bankman-Fried on Nov. 2, 2023, and sentenced him to 25 years on March 28, 2024. Bitcoin traded as low as about $15,625 on Nov. 9, though other factors drove the decline.