CoinDCX confirmed a 15.99 million USDT loss, about $16 million, from retired deposit wallets, three days after its chief executive dismissed reports of a breach as a false alarm.
In a blog post published October 22, the Indian exchange said the automated service that sweeps incoming deposits from its deposit addresses into managed wallets had failed for a period, so user deposits built up at an address it no longer used. That address belonged to wallet infrastructure retired after the exchange’s July 2025 hack, and CoinDCX said it carried unknown vulnerabilities. “This led to a loss of 15.99 million USDT which was absorbed by the company,” the company wrote.
The reversal came after a public dispute on X. When the outflows were flagged early on October 21, Sumit Gupta, CoinDCX’s co-founder and CEO, wrote that the reports were incorrect and that “the hackers seem to be re-using the old wallet addresses and this sounds like a false alarm.” The exchange’s first statement went further, saying the addresses involved had no connection with CoinDCX. The onchain analyst ZachXBT countered that one deposit address was still in use by a liquidity provider ten months after the July 2025 incident and had swept deposits into the exchange’s current hot wallet as recently as April and May 2026, and that $15.8 million in user deposits went unaccounted for. Those claims rest on his own tracing and are not confirmed by the company. The exact day of the outflow is also in dispute, stated as October 20 in one account and October 21 in the analyst’s own timestamp.
Once the loss was confirmed, CoinDCX said all affected user deposit wallets were credited even though the deposits had gone to the retired addresses, and that customer funds remain in segregated cold wallets with trading running as normal. Tether has frozen $2.2 million of USDT tied to the outflow.
The company has little new to add since. A representative for CoinDCX’s public relations agency declined follow-up questions about Gupta’s earlier statements and referred questions back to the blog post.
The loss adds to a troubled run for the exchange, which lost about $44 million in the July 2025 hack and saw its two founders arrested in March 2026 over a fraud complaint the company blames on a copycat site. Coinbase invested in CoinDCX in October 2025 at a $2.45 billion valuation, a stake regulators later cleared, and investigators like ZachXBT, who ran an undercover operation into a laundering ring, now shape the first hours of any breach story.
