Today, July 12 has turned out to be a black Friday for Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange, Bitpoint.
According to a Bloomberg update, the platform halted trading, withdrawal, and deposits on its platform after they realized that hackers had broken into one of their hot wallets and made away with $32 million worth of cryptocurrencies.
A more significant portion of the stolen funds, 2.5 billion yen (appr. $21 million) belonged to customers, with the rest which could be at least above $9 million belonging to the exchange. No funds in the cold wallets were missing.
Meanwhile, the report was quick to acknowledge that although Bitpoint holds an operating license in Japan, the exchange was one of the many cautioned last year by the Financial Services Agency (FSA) to improve their internal controls.
It appears the exchange operators did not heed that warning and would now have to pay the price, which is a loss of customer faith.
To reduce that effect, however, Remixpoint Inc, Bitpoint’s parent company revealed in a follow-up notice that there are plans to compensate customers, although we could not ascertain to what extent because of the message being in Japanese.
“The official service resumption date will be announced separately on our website. We will post information on our website from time to time,” another update by Bitpoint Japan confirmed.
Without a doubt, the incessant hack of cryptocurrency exchanges has almost become a menace that the crypto industry doesn’t have a solution.
Since the start of 2019, Coinfomania has reported several hack incidents with the most notable of them involving Cryptopia, Binance and more recently, GateHub. These platforms in total lost more than $60 million to hackers. Last year too, Zaif, another Japanese exchange lost $60 million to hackers.
