AscendEX Hot Wallets Show Zero Liquid Assets as Withdrawals Stall

Published by James Harris on June 26, 2026June 26, 2026

On-chain investigator ZachXBT publicly warned on June 26 that AscendEX’s known hot wallets appear to hold no meaningful liquid assets, including ETH, USDT, or SOL, and advised users to halt any new deposits to the Singapore-headquartered exchange while withdrawal complaints pile up.

ZachXBT’s assessment came after reviewing wallet addresses on Arkham and TRM, where he found reserves appear to lack large-cap tokens at a scale that suggests liquidity problems rather than routine cold storage rotation. The complaints predate his post by days: a user on June 22 described USDT proceeds from a token sale held for more than three and a half days with no transaction ID and an unresolved support ticket, and at least one separate account reported a PAXG withdrawal delayed roughly ten days. Funds vanishing from available balances without any corresponding blockchain transaction hash is the detail that matters most here, because it means affected users have no on-chain record to dispute or trace. That pattern echoes the early warning signs that preceded several smaller exchange collapses in 2022 and 2023, where withdrawal queues froze quietly before any official acknowledgment arrived.

AscendEX’s own documentation says users should receive a transaction ID within two hours of requesting a withdrawal. No public response from the exchange existed as of June 26.

The exchange is not a stranger to serious incidents. It suffered a $78 million hot-wallet hack in December 2021 across Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon, later attributed to the Lazarus Group, and separately halted trading on two stablecoins in May 2026 following what it described as irregular token minting activity. ZachXBT has flagged similar liquidity patterns at other smaller centralized exchanges this year, which suggests this is less an isolated anomaly and more a continuation of pressure on second-tier CEXs as users and capital consolidate around platforms with verifiable proof-of-reserves. Low hot-wallet balances alone do not confirm insolvency, since most exchanges hold the bulk of funds in unlabeled cold storage, but the combination of empty labeled wallets and frozen withdrawals without hashes is a harder pattern to explain away.

Users with funds currently stuck face a compounding risk: fraudulent recovery services are already targeting affected customers, demanding upfront payments in exchange for help retrieving frozen assets. This secondary scam layer is a predictable follow-on to any exchange disruption and has appeared after every major platform crisis in recent memory. Anyone with a pending withdrawal should route concerns through official support channels only, document every ticket number and timestamp, and treat any unsolicited recovery offer as a scam by default.