Meet the owners of CoinDCX and WazirX, victims of India’s biggest crypto theft after platforms hit by Rs 23610000000 cyber crime

Recently, two of India’s major cryptocurrency exchanges, CoinDCX and WazirX, have become victims of serious cyber attacks. CoinDCX suffered a loss of around Rs. 378 crore (about 44 million dollars) due to a breach in one of its internal accounts. This hacking incident took place on July 19. Last year, crypto exchange WazirX was also hit by a major cyber attack, just like the recent one at CoinDCX. In that incident, hackers stole user holdings worth about USD 230 million (around Rs. 1,983 crore).

Over the last few years, India has seen multiple cyber fraud cases in the crypto sector, and now CoinDCX has also joined the list of affected companies. The total value of both attacks adds up to a shocking Rs. 2,361 crore.

Let’s take a quick look at the people behind these two popular crypto exchanges:

WazirX, Founded by Nischal Shetty

Nischal Shetty is the founder and CEO of WazirX, one of India’s top cryptocurrency platforms. He is from Mumbai and studied computer science at Visvesvaraya Technological University and graduated in 2007.

He started his career as a software developer. In 2010, he launched his first startup called Crowdfire, a social media management app that became quite popular.

In 2018, Nischal started WazirX to help more people in India learn about and use cryptocurrency. The platform grew very fast and got over 1 crore (10 million) users. In 2019, it was bought by Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange.

Later, in 2022, Nischal started a new project called Shardeum. It’s a blockchain platform that is built to work for a large number of users. Its goal is to make blockchain technology easier to use and more helpful for everyone.

As per a recent Business Today report, Nischal Shetty and WazirX co-founder Siddharth Menon have moved to Dubai, but WazirX still has offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru.

Who owns CoinDCX?

While WazirX has been in the spotlight, CoinDCX, another major Indian crypto exchange, also made headlines after the recent cyber attack.

CoinDCX was founded in 2018 by Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal. Sumit Gupta, an IIT Bombay graduate, is the current CEO of the company. At just 19 years old, he started his first business and also worked at a multinational company in Tokyo.

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