This is some Ocean’s 11 type heist. Hackers snatched over $500 million in lesser known crypto currencies on Friday from Coincheck — a Japanese exchange run by retards.
On this news, shitcoins are higher.
Coincheck said that around 523 million of the exchange’s NEM coins were sent to another account around 3 a.m. local time (1 p.m. ET Thursday), according to a Google translate of a Japanese transcript of the Friday press conference from Logmi. The exchange has about 6 percent of yen-bitcoin trading, ranking fourth by market share on CryptoCompare.
The stolen NEM coins were worth about 58 billion yen at the time of detection, or roughly $534.8 million, according to the exchange. Coincheck subsequently restricted withdrawals of all currencies, including yen, and trading of cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin.
Cryptocurrency NEM, which intends to help businesses handle data digitally, briefly fell more than 20 percent Friday before recovering to trade about 10 percent lower near 85 cents, according to CoinMarketCap. Most other major digital currencies, including bitcoin, traded little changed on the day.
Coincheck management said in the press conference that it held the NEM coins in a “hot” wallet, referring to a method of storage that is linked to the internet. In contrast, leading U.S. exchange Coinbase says on its website that 98 percent of its digital currency holdings are offline, or in “cold” storage.
The Japanese exchange said it did not appear that hackers had stolen other digital currencies.
The Coincheck hack follows news in December that a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange called Youbit lost 17 percent of its digital assets. Its parent Yapian filed for bankruptcy.
An analyst from Morgan Stanley estimated in late 2017 that ~$630 million in bitcoin has been lost to hackers so far. If you enjoy to rob banks, clearly the best way to do it these days is to simply hack a crypto exchange, as their seems to be no way of identifying or stopping these crimes from occurring.
If you enjoy the content at iBankCoin, please follow us on Twitter
inside job
Yep, it started with the internal decision of having a “hot” wallet.
Very likely to be attributed to someone in the know. Follow the money as they used to say
So…should we all just be prepared to lose whatever shitcoins we have in whatever exchanges at this stage of the game? Binance etc?
What’s wrong with that? The Aztecs ran an empire devoted to gifting blood to their gods. Shitcoins would make a nice offering me thinks. Enjoy… ahhhhh soooo!™
If you have a lot I would not leave it all sitting on an exchange. Leave what you are actively trading, keep the rest in your own wallet, hardware or otherwise. One of the central tenets of crypto is to have control of your private keys.
prepare to bitcoin 1000$
then 100$
then it will find its normal worthless value
There is a reason the head is served with the meat. Now go get some sweet and sour “pork”.
Don’t. Store. Your. Coins. On. The. Exchange…
Hardware wallets exist for a reason.
I lost some money on Binance to a hack due to my carelessness which taught me a valuable lesson but not all coins can be easily stored offline.
Some coins offer wallets but not sure whether to trust them. Thoughts on that?
If you get the wallet from the coin’s official website, or better yet if you are competent enough, if you compile the wallet from source code yourself, in most cases it is safe to store them there. Of course in theory something shady could be going on in the wallet but with open source there is at least the likelihood that someone would find that if it was there and the core team and coin might become worthless, so therefore unlikely they would do something like that.
You can usually encrypt the private keys and make backups yourself, and then nobody else can get at them without hacking your passphrase. I store most of my crypto in a wallet like that (and am also a developer for a coin).
My Nano S Ledger delivered today from Amazon.
FEYE needs to join the chain gang already. Look at that monthly chart….