Mercado Bitcoin to Reopen Pix Withdrawals After $49M Bitcoin (BTC) Hack

Pix Withdrawals Return Next Week

Mercado Bitcoin (BTC) will reopen deposits and withdrawals in Brazilian reais through Pix, the country's instant payment rail, at some point next week, a company representative said on Tuesday. The step is the first tangible recovery since a Nov. 2 intrusion drained an estimated $49 million from wallets linked to the platform, one of Brazil's largest Bitcoin (BTC) exchanges and a core on-ramp into the local Bitcoin market. Pix, run by the Brazilian central bank, settles bank transfers in seconds and has become the default cash path for retail crypto flows in the country. That matters here because most Brazilian customers move in and out of crypto through reais, not stablecoins. For now the reopening covers reais only: customers may withdraw solely to accounts registered in their own name, a guardrail meant to keep payouts from being redirected, and the exchange will credit customer balances with proceeds from the settlement of fixed income products, giving holders of those instruments a second route back to their cash. Cash withdrawals have been frozen since the attack, leaving customers without access to their reais for more than a week. Crypto deposits and withdrawals remain suspended with no return date set, and trading on the venue stays closed as well, so anyone following the Bitcoin (BTC) price through the exchange's own screens still has no live window. The company has framed the restart as a staged rollout rather than a single switch. “The resumption will proceed gradually,” the representative said, adding that new services will be announced to clients in advance through Mercado Bitcoin's official channels. No rollout schedule has appeared on the exchange's website yet, and the representative's comments came through direct communication rather than a posted notice.

The slower phase of the recovery is already visible. On Monday, one week after the attack, the exchange restored account visibility in read-only mode. Balances can be seen; nothing can be moved, and the company has not said when that changes. The company has communicated each step through its official channels, with the website still carrying no timeline. Read-only access also lets customers verify their reais balances ahead of the Pix reopening next week, which is the practical point of the phase. Customers who log in are routed to a page describing the security measures and the regular audits the company says it has run since 2018, with a link to a separate account of the incident itself. Fabricio Tota, Mercado Bitcoin's vice president of new business, laid out the next phase of the recovery in a recent video, although the exchange has yet to publish a rollout schedule on its website. Tota's video is currently the most detailed public account of the recovery sequence; the written schedule that would let customers plan around it is still missing. The timing of the breach matters for context. The Nov. 2 attack came four days after hackers took roughly $6.3 billion in crypto out of Binance hot wallets in a separate incident, a theft the FBI attributed to North Korean hackers. Binance said it would cover those losses with its emergency fund and corporate treasury. Mercado Bitcoin (BTC) has made no equivalent public commitment on its own $49 million shortfall, and it has not said whether customer crypto assets were touched beyond the suspended rails. No figure has been published for how much customer money sits behind the suspended crypto rails. Until crypto withdrawals resume, the reopening of Pix answers the cash question while the custody question stays open.

Custody Questions After a $49M Drain

COINOTAG's own reading: the market backdrop is soft, with Bitcoin (BTC) near $74,000 after a 4.94% weekly drop earlier this month, a level our Bitcoin technical analysis pages track in detail. The $49 million that left Mercado Bitcoin sits firmly in crypto whale territory, and with no public trace of the stolen funds disclosed so far, their destination is unresolved. Breaches like this routinely revive the Bitcoin maximalism case that coins held on an exchange are never fully yours, and the old instruction to HODL picks up a second meaning about holding your own keys. The exchange says clients will hear about each new service in advance through its official channels; the test is whether confidence returns with the reais.