British crypto ratings firm Evai avoid $196 million Bitmart hack

Company's AI ratings technology revealed concerns with Bitmart, leading the British crypto ratings company to request delisting with the exchange just two weeks before hack.

Dubai, UAE – The British AI company Evai that launched the world’s first unbiased crypto ratings platform evai.io earlier this year, managed to avoid the hack on the Bitmart exchange which happened on Saturday 5 November. The hack – one of the biggest centralised exchange hacks in history – saw an estimated $196 million worth of crypto stolen including Hero, Safemoon, BabyDodge, Floki and many more.

Evai CEO Matthew Dixon told us, “This is of course devastating for all of the projects targeted and the wider market as a whole. It’s crucial that centralised exchanges – which both crypto projects and investors use – go through rigorous due diligence to ensure these types of attacks don’t happen.” Evai listed their EVAI token with Bitmart back in September before writing to the exchange four weeks ago to request delisting. “It’s difficult to take the decision to delist from a major exchange, however we applied our AI and machine learning ratings technology to Bitmart. Some concerning results of questionable volume and users were raised by our technology, leading to us requesting to be delisted.” The exchange had over $1.5 million EVAI tokens stored which would have been compromised in the hack yesterday had the company’s AI not raised red flags.

Security analysis firm Peckshield raised the alarm late on Saturday night, reporting that $100 million in various crypto was stolen on the Ethereum network with a further $96 million being stolen on Binance Smart Chain. Since the attack, the hackers have been dumping the stolen tokens through the 1Inch decentralised exchange platform, swapping them for ETH and transferring them out through a secondary address into privacy mixer Tornado Cash, making the movements of the funds harder to trace. Initially, Bitmart denied the exchange had been compromised on their official Telegram Group, before admitting there was a hack.

Evai encourage everyone to look at the free-to-use crypto ratings platform evai.io to help support wise decision-making in the crypto space. Matt explains, “Evai.io was developed to help democratise the crypto space using unbiased AI and machine learning. The fact that we applied our technology to Bitmart – which ultimately helped us avoid this devastating attack – only strengthens our resolve to publicly offer our exchange ratings to end users. It will help crypto projects and investors in the future decide which exchanges to use based on the ratings awarded.”

The British company now headquartered in the Crypto Centre, Dubai, has seen interest from various fields, all looking to enter the crypto market via the academically peer-reviewed research the Evai project is built on. Last month, legendary UFC legend Khabib Nurmagomedov visited the Evai offices, meeting the team and discussing the future of AI in the crypto space.