More Than 4.5 Million Tokens Linked to Mercado Bitcoin Incident Frozen as Deposits and Withdrawals Suspended
Key Facts
Brazilian platform Mercado Bitcoin detected a security incident in one of its systems in the early hours of Monday, November 2, 2026, and temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals as a precaution, CNN Brasil reported. The outlet quoted Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino as saying the company had frozen more than 4.5 million tokens linked to the incident. Mercado Bitcoin said the event caused no customer losses and did not result in their data being leaked. The suspension temporarily halted deposits and withdrawals through the platform while its teams work to investigate and trace assets. CNN Brasil did not report when the two operations would resume.
The company described the event as a “security incident” in one of its systems and said its teams were investigating, tracing assets and coordinating with the relevant authorities and partners. The platform’s response, according to CNN Brasil, includes temporarily suspending deposits and withdrawals as a precaution, with the report giving no duration for the suspension. Halting deposits and withdrawals means customers cannot use those operations during the suspension to add assets to the platform or transfer them out. The company, meanwhile, said the incident caused no customer losses or data leak. The operational impact of the suspension and the company’s denial of customer harm are central to its stated response.
As for the token freeze, CNN Brasil attributed the announcement to Ardoino and said Tether had frozen more than 4.5 million tokens “as a result of the incident.” The outlet’s report gave the token unit as “USTD,” apparently a typographical error; the report itself therefore does not establish the correct token symbol in a direct quotation. The figure applies to the tokens the outlet said Tether had frozen and is not an estimate of losses for Mercado Bitcoin or its customers. The available details did not provide a total for affected assets. The platform said asset tracing was part of its response teams’ work, alongside the investigation and coordination with authorities and partners.
The investment relationship between the two companies dates to July 7, 2026, when Tether announced a $20 million investment in a strategic growth funding round for Mercado Bitcoin. Tether said in its announcement that the platform served 4.5 million users and had issued tokenized assets worth more than 2 billion Brazilian reais. The announcement added that it operated under more than 10 licenses in Brazil and Europe. These figures provide background on the platform’s size and operating reach as Tether described them in July, before the security incident CNN Brasil reported in November. The announcement links Tether’s earlier investment in the company with the token freeze the current report attributed to Ardoino.
Tether said the funding announced in July would be used to accelerate Mercado Bitcoin’s growth across several priorities, including payments, tokenized investment offerings, lending and credit, and on-chain capital markets, as well as partnerships and international expansion. In a separate regulatory development, Brazil’s central bank said virtual asset service providers already operating in the country had to formally submit license applications by October 2026. The bank said changes related to anti-money laundering took effect on October 1, 2026. These regulatory developments place the platform’s activity within a sector that, in the same month, faced a deadline for license applications and the implementation of anti-money laundering changes. The sources did not link these rules to the security incident.
Mercado Bitcoin’s stated next step is for its teams to continue investigating, tracing assets and coordinating with authorities and partners, CNN Brasil reported, citing the company’s statement. The report did not specify when deposits and withdrawals would resume; this is an absence of a date in the published report, not a company statement that the service would remain suspended indefinitely. The available details also do not include an independent accounting of losses or a financial estimate of affected assets, while the company said customers had suffered no losses. The confirmed information about the response therefore centers on the precautionary suspension, the denial of customer losses and a data leak, and the freeze CNN Brasil attributed to Ardoino.