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Algorand Wallet MyAlgo Advises Users to Withdraw Funds After $9.6M Exploit

John Woods, chief technology officer of the Algorand Foundation, said 25 wallets were affected.

Updated May 9, 2023, 4:09 a.m. Published Feb 28, 2023, 12:01 p.m.

MyAlgo was hit by $9.6 million attack. (Mika Baumeister/Unsplash)

MyAlgo, a native wallet for the Algorand blockchain network, has advised users to withdraw funds after it was struck by an exploit last week.

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT said that 19.5 million ALGO and 3.5 million USDC worth $9.6 million have been stolen and that centralized exchange ChangeNow has frozen $1.5 million.

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"We strongly advise all users to withdraw any funds from Mnemonic wallets that were stored in MyAlgo," MyAlgo confirmed in a tweet.

John Woods, chief technology officer of the Algorand Foundation, said that 25 wallets have been affected and that the exploit is "not the result of an underlying issue with the Algorand protocol or SDK (software development kit)."

Woods added that he will post an explainer video once the investigation into the hack concludes. MyAlgo said that it doesn't know the root cause of the exploit.

Algorand's token (ALGO) was recently trading at 25 cents, down less than 1 cent in the past 24 hours, according to CoinDesk data.

Algorand On-chain Data Wallet Hack Exploit

Oliver Knight

Oliver Knight is the co-leader of CoinDesk data tokens and data team. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022 Oliver spent three years as the chief reporter at Coin Rivet. He first started investing in bitcoin in 2013 and spent a period of his career working at a market making firm in the UK. He does not currently have any crypto holdings.