India's largest crypto exchange absorbs $16 million loss from internal process failure tied to retired wallet

CoinDCX, India’s largest crypto exchange, says it has absorbed a $16 million loss after an internal process failed to move customer deposits out of a retired wallet.

It all started last week, when blockchain sleuths flagged about $16 million in suspicious outflows from wallets linked to the Mumbai-based exchange. CoinDCX was quick to dismiss the reports, with CEO Sumit Gupta calling it a false alarm on X.

A spokesperson told CoinDesk that the addresses cited by the sleuths were old ones, created in January 2025 and compromised in the July 2025 hack, which cost the exchange about $44 million, and that CoinDCX had not used them since. In essence, the exchange said the activity did not have any connection with CoinDCX. But ZachXBT, a well-known on-chain investigator, said at least one of those addresses, labeled TQKJQ, was in use by a liquidity provider and swept user deposits to CoinDCX’s current public hot wallet as recently as April and May 2026.

On Sunday, CoinDCX published a blog post on the activity tied to TQKJQ, saying the wallet belongs to its old operational wallet infrastructure and that the loss was tied to it.

“This wallet belongs to our old operational wallet infrastructure, which was compromised during the security incident we reported on July 19, 2025, and was deprecated as a result,” CoinDCX said.

The post explained that some users mistakenly continued to deposit funds into the deprecated, or retired, addresses even after the exchange deprecated them following the 2025 hack. CoinDCX credited those users’ portfolios the moment the funds reached the deprecated wallet. A secondary service, which the exchange calls sweeping, was meant to then move the funds from the deprecated address into the primary CoinDCX wallet.

However, that process failed for a particular period, causing deposits to accumulate in the deprecated address.

“This led to a loss of 15.99 million USDT which was absorbed by the company,” it said. The blog post does not call it a hack and does not say who was behind the irregular fund movement or how it happened. CoinDesk has reached out to CoinDCX to ask whether it means the old, retired addresses were hacked again.

CoinDCX said it noticed unusual activity in its systems on Oct. 21, and that its controls and immediate response measures prevented any impact to its active wallets and trading systems. The next day, it noticed irregular fund movement via the blockchain data and through reports from its user community. CoinDCX said customers’ crypto deposit balances are unaffected and fully accounted for.