Empowa Suffers Unauthorised ADA and NIGHT Transfers Worth Over $1 Million
Cardano-based DeFi platform Empowa has reported two connected incidents of unauthorized transfers from its project-controlled wallets.
The first incident involved Empowa's ADA treasury wallet, which saw the movement of 143,710 ADA between November 2025 and June 2026. The wallet also held 48,219 NIGHT tokens claimed from Empowa's Midnight airdrop allocation without the project's knowledge.
However, one-quarter of the NIGHT allocation remains locked and requires another signature from the treasury wallet's keys before it can be withdrawn. Most of the transferred ADA passed through an intermediary wallet, which deposited 100,000 ADA into the Liqwid lending protocol as collateral and borrowed USDCx against it.
The second incident involved the $empowa.public and $empowa.ispo wallets, which held undistributed EMP tokens. Between June and August 2026, 4.24 million EMP was transferred from the two wallets. Empowa said about 850,000 EMP moved during the first phase and was subsequently sold for ADA on Minswap and VyFi.
Empowa has ruled out any connection to the SecondFi security incident disclosed in June 2026, which saw hackers siphon 16.1 million ADA from 374 user wallets after exploiting a flaw in SecondFi's wallet-generation software.