Solana Hacked, Binance, KuCoin, OKX CEOs Advise Investors to Move Assets to Their Exchanges

As Solana (SOL) hit the headlines with a hack on Aug. 3, CEOs of major cryptocurrency exchanges — including Binance’s Changpeng Zhao (CZ), KuCoin’s Johnny Lyu and OKX’s Jay Hao - SOL investors are advised to transfer their funds to their own exchange as an immediate safety measure.

Many blockchain investigators and cryptocurrency investors discovered an allegedly widespread leak of private keys that allowed attackers to steal native SOL tokens and Solana-compatible SPL tokens such as USD Coin from Phantom and Slope wallets ( USDC). However, the root cause of the attack remains a mystery, with all parties, including Solana and Phantom, denying their fault. The official stance shared by Phantom with Cointelegraph is:

"We are working closely with other teams to understand the reported vulnerability in the Solana ecosystem. At this time, the team does not believe this is a Phantom-specific issue."

While investigating Solana, CZ warned investors that "Solana has had an active security incident," and more than 7,000 wallets of SOL and USDC funds have been stolen. He advised investors who were not attacked to move their assets to a cold wallet or the Binance exchange.

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Similar assurances were made to KuCoin users by Lyu, who confirmed that all SOL assets were unaffected by the hack. He said:

"We are in close contact with the Solana team and have blocked suspicious addresses as requested."

Meanwhile, OKX’s Jay Hao echoed CZ’s idea, advising investors to transfer their assets to OKX to protect themselves from hackers.

Given the uncertainty behind the potential and reach of the hack, other crypto exchanges such as Bybit have proactively suspended all deposits and withdrawals on the Solana blockchain.