Mercadopago and Nubank halted cryptocurrency deposits and withdrawals Friday afternoon, citing instability from an external risk monitoring and anti-money laundering prevention vendor.
Mercadopago customers saw an in-app message: "Due to system instabilities, it is not possible to make cryptocurrency transfers at this time. Your deposits will be credited late. We are working to resolve."
Mercadopago identified "instability in crypto asset transfer operations, resulting from an incident suffered by a risk monitoring and money laundering prevention provider." The company preemptively suspended withdrawals while maintaining crypto purchases and sales. Mercadopago said it is "following the situation in real time and will inform users as soon as operations are normalized," without naming a timeline.
Nubank blamed the same external data provider for its disruption. The neobank assured customers the incident did not affect internal infrastructure or compromise customer security. "All assets and information remain protected. The other crypto products continue to function normally," Nubank said.
Both firms use Paxos as their crypto custody provider. Unconfirmed social media speculation alleged a hack targeting Paxos, but Paxos issued no official incident report and its status page showed no disruptions on Nov. 6.
The outages compound security concerns in crypto markets. Last month, Binance suffered a breach in which attackers stole over $6 billion from a hot wallet. Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil's largest crypto exchange, lost over $46 million in a Monday attack. Mercado Bitcoin committed to compensating affected users without socializing losses but kept withdrawals suspended.
