Cardano Project Empowa Reports Unauthorized Transfers From Three Wallets

Empowa said three of its project wallets were linked to unauthorized transfers, including a treasury wallet holding ADA and two older EMP allocation wallets on-chain named empowa.public and empowa.ispo. According to Foresight News, the treasury wallet transferred about 143,710 ADA, about 36,000 NIGHT tied to the Midnight airdrop, and the two EMP wallets transferred a combined 4.24 million EMP, including about 3.054 million from public and about 338,000 from ispo. The project said some of the funds were routed through a shared intermediary address and partially exchanged. By September 1, about 1.2 million EMP had been sold on Minswap. Empowa said the incident involved keys created when the project launched in 2022 and held by its co-founder and CTO from 2021 to 2024. After the handover in 2025, some wallets continued using the original configuration because of integration needs.