SecondFi Says 129M ADA Was Rescued After Wallet Exploit

SecondFi Counts 16M ADA External Drains

SecondFi’s update split the incident into two categories. It said four draining events were identified, three of them by external threat actors, causing roughly 16 million ADA in losses across 374 addresses.

Those figures are lower than the raw on-chain totals circulating around the exploit. SecondFi said the larger 129 million ADA pool was secured through emergency measures during the active incident and would continue to move through an independent, qualified third-party custodian for affected addresses.

The company also said an external accounting firm would audit the rescued holdings. It directed affected users to submit claims through support.secondfi.io once verification is complete, but a final reimbursement timetable was not disclosed.

SecondFi’s App Store listing says the app has more than 1 million users and was built by EMURGO, a co-founding entity of the Cardano blockchain. That scale is why the incident spread quickly beyond ordinary wallet-support channels.

For users, the immediate operational risk is simple: an affected seed phrase is not made safe by being imported into different wallet software. The safer path is a fresh wallet with a newly generated recovery phrase, while claim details should come from official SecondFi channels rather than social media impersonators.

Bitquery Traces 129M ADA Into Vault

Bitquery reconstructed two waves of transactions and said more than 129 million ADA and 3,838 token types were swept from 3,072 wallets belonging to SecondFi users. Its report said the larger second wave concentrated 129,430,001 ADA into a single vault wallet that had not moved as of the publication.

The analytics firm said it had not independently verified SecondFi’s custodian routing or the company’s lower external-loss figure. It did, however, say the on-chain record supports a much larger sweep than the initial 16 million ADA loss number alone suggests.

The difference comes from what can be recovered. Bitquery described the first wave as roughly 12 million ADA plus tokens that moved through Minswap and other trading paths, while the larger second-wave ADA balance remained visible in one dormant vault.

That makes the case unusual among wallet exploits. Many incidents become harder to recover as attackers bridge, mix or sell assets quickly. Here, the largest ADA pool is still identifiable on-chain, if SecondFi’s custody and claims process holds up under audit.

Security incidents have hit several chains and applications this month, but the mechanics differ. The recent Aztec legacy-contract exploits involved deprecated smart contracts, while the SecondFi case centers on wallet key creation before a user ever signs a DeFi transaction.

Cardano Users Wait For Claims Audit

The next test is not only technical. SecondFi now needs to show which addresses qualify, how the accounting firm verifies claims, what the custodian controls, and whether users who lost ADA in the dispersed first wave are treated differently from users tied to the rescued vault.

Cardano’s base protocol is also likely to face a reputational drag even if the exploit stayed at the wallet layer. Retail users usually experience crypto through wallets, exchanges and apps, so a key-generation failure can damage confidence in the ecosystem even when validators and consensus rules are not implicated.

The timing is difficult for ADA. The token has fallen from about $0.242 on May 25 to roughly $0.143 on June 24, according to CoinGecko data reviewed by Daily Crypto Briefs, and the broader market remained in Extreme Fear.

Wallet risk is becoming a larger market story because exploits are no longer confined to experimental DeFi contracts. Daily Crypto Briefs recently tracked how crypto platforms lost 605 million dollars in cyberattacks in under 20 days, underscoring how often user-facing infrastructure has become the weak point.

The next confirmed checkpoints are SecondFi’s claims instructions, the external accounting review, any evidence that the 129 million ADA custodian route is complete, and a full postmortem explaining how the wallet-generation flaw reached production.

Until those details are public, the supported conclusion is narrower than the headline panic: SecondFi says a large ADA pool was rescued, external drains remain material, and affected users should not treat an old recovery phrase as safe simply because it opens in another Cardano wallet.