Crypto exchange WazirX relaunches trading 16 months after $230M breach

Indian crypto exchange WazirX will restart trading on Friday, Oct. 24, ending a 16-month suspension that followed a $235 million hack in July 2024.

Trading will start with zero fees for at least 30 days, WazirX founder and CEO Nischal Shetty wrote on X. The relaunch follows Singapore High Court approval of a restructuring plan, enabling partial user recoveries estimated at 55–65% of losses.

WazirX introduced a phased rollout schedule, beginning with trading in USDT stablecoin and the Indian rupee in fiat markets, with full operations expected by October 27. The exchange noted that several projects underwent important changes while the platform was inactive, so the phased timeline is necessary to review listing standards and updates during the downtime.

On July 18, 2024, WazirX suffered a massive cyberattack, resulting in a loss of $235 million in digital assets. Investigators officially attributed the hack to the North Korean hacking group Lazarus Group. The attackers exploited WazirX's multi-signature (multisig) wallet system, manipulating three WazirX signers and a fourth signer from their custodian partner, Liminal Custody, into approving a malicious transaction that upgraded the smart contract controlling the wallet. This gave the attackers full control, allowing them to drain the funds. Following the breach, WazirX suspended all trading and withdrawal operations on the platform.

WazirX's parent company, Zettai Pte Ltd, filed a moratorium application with the Singapore High Court in August 2024 to initiate a restructuring scheme under Singapore's Insolvency, Restructuring and Dissolution Act. The plan focused on a scheme of arrangement to provide a structured recovery for its users and creditors, a process overseen by the Singapore High Court. The final restructuring plan was highly successful, receiving approval from over 95% of participating creditors (including users), both by number and by claim value.

Users would receive Recovery Tokens (RTs), redeemable over a period (e.g., 36 months) and tied to future profits from WazirX's operations, recoveries of stolen assets, and liquidation of illiquid holdings.

Meanwhile, the FTX Recovery Trust, representing the crypto exchange FTX, which failed in 2022, is also in the process of making payouts to users. FTX went bankrupt due to alleged fraud and mismanagement. It took over two years from FTX’s 2022 collapse for the Recovery Trust to begin making the first payouts to users in 2025. The third distribution of funds, amounting to $1.6 billion, began on September 30. In total, the FTX estate expects to have between $14.7 billion and $16.5 billion in assets to repay creditors.

WazirX resumes trading after 16-month halt following $235M hack