BtcTurk confirms cyber attack, AVAX wipes out nearly 7% value on the day

• Avalanche suffered a decline in its price, erasing 7% value on Saturday. 
• AVAX’s social dominance hit a near three month peak, per Santiment data. 
• An on-chain analyst identified a $54.2 million AVAX transfer to Coinbase THORChain, says transfer is related to a BtcTurk cyber attack. 

Avalanche (AVAX) wiped out nearly 7% of its value on Saturday, June 22. The smart contract platform recently announced a partnership with Konami Digital Entertainment. 

The game developer is expected to debut Resella, an NFT platform that simplifies creation, issuance and trading of these digital assets on Avalanche. 

Avalanche’s AVAX token hit by correction 

AVAX is trading at $25.88 on Binance, down nearly 7% on the day, per TradingView data. The smart contract platform’s token suffered a correction over the weekend, while its social dominance hit a near three-month peak. 

Social dominance is a metric used to identify an asset’s relevance among traders. The metric identifies the asset’s share in crypto discussions across social media platforms like X. Santiment data shows that AVAX social dominance is 1.211%, up from 0.7281% on March 22, nearly three months ago. 

The metric has no direct correlation with the asset’s price, however, it typically precedes local tops/ bottoms as seen in the Santiment chart below. 

Social dominance and Avalanche price

On-chain analyst says AVAX price decline is related to a cyber attack on BtcTurk

On-chain analyst ZachXBT said in recent tweets on X that the decline in Avalanche is likely caused by a large deposit exceeding $52 million. The AVAX transfer was made to Coinbase by an address that the analyst traced back to a cyber attack on one of Turkey’s crypto exchanges, BtcTurk. 

ZachXBT monitored the addresses activity and believes that the entity withdrew over $46 million in Bitcoin from centralized exchanges Binance and Coinbase. 

BtcTurk confirms cyber attack, assures users are not affected

BtcTurk confirmed the news of an attack on the exchange platform’s hot wallets. The exchange notes that the attack was limited to some assets in its hot wallets and cold wallets remain safe. The exchang temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals as a precaution. Hot wallets of 10 cryptocurrencies were affected and the situation does not affect users. The exchange said in an email,

“BtcTurk’s financial strength far exceeds the amounts affected by this attack, and our users’ assets will not be affected by these losses.”