The logo of Liquid. ©Liquid

Asian Tech Press -- Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid announced on Thursday that it had been hacked and suffered a loss of estimated $97 million.

In a statement, Liquid said its Operations and Technology teams "detected unauthorized access to some of the crypto wallets managed at Liquid" and subsequently discovered that "approximately 91.35mm USDe of crypto assetmoved out of Liquid wallets by an unauthorized party".

Thanks to the help of the crypto community and other exchanges, $16.13 million worth of ERC-20 assets have been frozen, Liquid noted.

The company urged its users not to deposit any crypto assets into their Liquid wallets and said it has stopped all cryptocurrency withdrawals.

While the exchange did not disclose the exact amount of losses, hackers may have stolen about $97 million worth of cryptocurrency assets, according to an analysis by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.

This is the second major cryptocurrency theft in just over a week. On Aug. 10, hackers stole more than $600 million worth of digital tokens from Poly Network, a decentralised finance platform, but later returned some of the assets.