WazirX Restructuring Cleared in Massive Relief for $230M Hack Victims

Singapore’s High Court has approved Zettai Pte. Ltd.’s restructuring scheme, clearing the path for the reopening of Indian crypto exchange WazirX less than a year after it was crippled by the largest hack on any crypto business in the country. The sanction order followed an August re-vote that saw 95.7% of creditors by number and 94.6% by value support the plan. “As soon as the scheme is legally effective, we will restart platform operations within 10 business days,” WazirX founder Nischal Shetty claimed. If all goes as planned, WazirX could return to operations before the end of October, marking a rare, court-supervised resurrection in the exchange world. Users affected by the hack are expected to regain access to the platform and see initial distributions shortly after the restart. WazirX will also partner with the U.S.-based custodian BitGo to strengthen asset protection ahead of relaunch, a move aimed at rebuilding user trust and satisfying new regulatory and security benchmarks. Part of the refund plan is to launch a decentralized exchange (DEX), Issue recovery tokens that can be traded, and perform a periodic buyback of recovery tokens using platform profits and new revenue streams. WazirX users lost over $230 million in a Lazarus Group-led security breach in July 2024 after an apparent private key interception, which the exchange attributed to its custody provider, Liminal, a claim the latter rejected, pointing instead to vulnerabilities on WazirX’s end. The hacker laundered all the stolen funds to various addresses using Tornado Cash to obscure the transactions, as CoinDesk reported in September 2024 , dampening hopes of a full recovery. WazirX has since worked to recover the funds with limited success.