CoinDCX Under Fire Over Wallet Anomalies
TREE NEWS reports: CoinDCX, one of India’s leading crypto exchanges, has publicly denied that recent suspicious on-chain transfers involve any current user funds, claiming the activity stems from a deprecated wallet compromised in July 2025 and abandoned since. But independent blockchain detective ZachXBT immediately challenged that account, presenting on-chain evidence that the supposedly dead address remained active for nearly a year and that roughly $15.8 million in user deposits may be unaccounted for.
The Contradiction: A Dead Wallet That Keeps Moving Money
The wallet labeled TQKJQ — a core CoinDCX deposit address — was used continuously by the platform’s liquidity providers for ten months after the alleged hack. Transaction timestamps show it was still receiving retail deposits and miner fees in April and May 2026, and even sweeping funds directly into CoinDCX’s currently verified hot wallet. In standard exchange risk frameworks, a compromised address should be blacklisted and removed from the front-end deposit gateway immediately. The sustained interaction directly undermines CoinDCX’s claim of complete abandonment.
Fund Flow: $15.99M USDT Split and Funneled to Major Exchanges
On-chain monitoring shows a sudden, dense outflow from CoinDCX’s hot wallet and several linked deposit nodes in the early hours of yesterday. Approximately 15.99 million USDT and 5,783 native tokens were sent to a newly created Tron address, with a single transfer of 15.819 million USDT. The receiving address then rapidly fragmented the funds into dozens of smaller amounts, routing them through multiple relay layers into deposit addresses at OKX, Binance, and Gate.io — a pattern consistent with layering and rapid off-ramping.
Risk-Control and Compliance Fallout
CoinDCX now faces a dual credibility crisis. If the address was indeed fully controlled by hackers, then its risk systems allowed liquidity providers and users to keep depositing into a compromised wallet for nearly a year while the main hot wallet continued to interact with it — a catastrophic private-key and routing failure. If the address remained under internal or authorized market-maker control, then moving over $15 million to multiple external exchanges points to possible liquidity concealment or insider mishandling of assets.
As a regulated Indian unicorn subject to strict tax and anti-money-laundering rules, CoinDCX can ill afford ambiguity in fund flows. The market is now waiting for a direct technical response on hot-wallet interaction logs and the ownership of the market-maker funds.
Outlook
The episode underscores how on-chain transparency is reshaping exchange accountability. For CoinDCX, a detailed, verifiable explanation — including address lifecycle records and custody architecture — is essential to restore depositor trust. For the broader industry, it is a reminder that claims of “abandoned wallets” are only credible when the blockchain agrees.
