Stablecoin bank Kontigo suffers security breach: $340,000 compensated, less than a month of funding remaining due to unforeseen events

【BlockBeats】Latin American stablecoin bank Kontigo just went through a tough battle. This startup, which entered the market this year with support from Y Combinator, discovered a serious security vulnerability over the weekend and responded incredibly quickly—immediately patching it. By January 6th, the company had fully compensated 1,005 affected users, totaling $340,900 in stablecoins, without missing a single cent.

What’s more heartbreaking is that CEO Jesus A. Castillo’s personal account was not spared. The co-founder openly stated on social media that this was a direct attack targeting the company’s management and users. He also announced that the attacker’s identity has been locked down, and these people “won’t get away.”

The timing is a bit awkward. On December 22nd, Kontigo announced the completion of a $20 million seed round led by FoundersX Ventures, intending to use the funds to accelerate product development and expand into emerging markets. Less than two weeks later, this incident happened.

However, looking at the data, this company is indeed moving fast—less than a year since its founding, it has achieved an annualized revenue of $30 million, processed over $1 billion in payments, and has more than 1 million active users. Even more impressive is that a team of only 7 people is supporting this scale. But Kontigo has also been in the news before due to “de-banking” issues caused by frozen bank accounts. Although Castillo denied it was a banking problem, blaming the intermediary instead, trust crises once arise are hard to fully resolve.