Zilliqa hits pause button on ZIL after an exchange-side cold wallet goes walkies 🧊🚶

Zilliqa, a layer-1 blockchain network, said Monday it is investigating a security incident tied to an exchange partner after $ZIL was stolen from a cold wallet, and has asked exchanges to temporarily pause $ZIL deposits and withdrawals as a precaution. The project disclosed the incident in an X post, saying it had notified trading platforms to halt token movement while it works through the details. "We understand the community will have questions. We will share further updates as soon as we have verified information," Zilliqa said.

The network did not disclose the amount of $ZIL stolen, identify the affected exchange partner or outline a possible cause. The pause applies to deposits and withdrawals of $ZIL, the native token used to pay transaction fees and power smart contracts on Zilliqa.

Zilliqa launched in 2017 as a sharding-focused blockchain, a design that splits transaction processing across multiple groups of nodes to improve scalability. It was co-founded by researchers Amrit Kumar and Xinshu Dong, with mainnet going live in January 2019. According to CoinGecko, $ZIL was trading at around $0.0025 at the time of writing, down 7.1% over the past 24 hours.