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Following the demise of one of Poland’s largest crypto exchanges last week, news is breaking today that one in Japan has just been hacked.
Bitpoint Suspends Services
An official announcement today stated that Japanese crypto exchange Bitpoint has suspended services following a heist to the tune of around $32 million in crypto assets. A Boomberg report added that XRP was one of the major cryptocurrencies involved in the theft of about 2.5 billion yen in customer funds. A further billion yen in assets belonging to the exchange were also lost.
In addition to XRP and Bitcoin, a total five different cryptocurrencies which had been stored in the affected BJP managed hot wallets, including Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Ethereum, were pilfered. The announcement indicated that Bitpoint’s cold wallets were not affected.
The report added that Bitpoint was one of a number of exchanges to be served a business improvement order from the Financial Service Agency (FSA), Japan’s far reaching financial regulator. The order was lifted in June and clearly has not been enough to thwart the threat of cyber incursions.
The move followed one of the largest hacks in crypto history when Coincheck was plundered for over $530 million in NEM tokens early last year. Similarly the pilfered coins were stored in low security hot wallets on the exchange.
In the official statement Bitpoint said that it “detected an error related to Ripple remittance,” which were discovered to be “leaked illegally” on further investigation. It added that the anomalies were detected late last night and services were suspended early this morning in Asia.
Remixpoint Inc., which owns Bitpoint, saw its shares plunge by over 20 percent during Tokyo trading today.
Crypto Market Reaction
Bitpoint is a relatively small player in comparison to the big boys. Markets did not even blip when Binance, the world’s largest exchange, announced it had lost around $40 million in a hack in May. This may have been because funds were protected by the firm’s SAFU, Secure Asset Fund for Users. It remains to be seen whether Bitpoint will also be refunding all of its affected clients following this breach however strict Japanese regulations may leave the company without a choice.
There has been no measurable effect on crypto markets which are actually starting to recover slightly from Bitcoin’s correction yesterday. Japan’s native crypto Monacoin did plunge almost 10 percent after the announcement but has since recovered slightly to trade at $2.10.
Earlier this week Poland’s largest crypto exchange, BitMarket, declared bankruptcy as hacking speculation circulated and late last month Singapore based Bitrue was hacked for over $4.5 million in XRP.
Image from Shutterstock
