Coincheck Exchange hacked, NEMs stolen for $530 million

As the Japanese source MineCC reports, the management of the crypto exchange Coincheck officially announced the breaking and stealing of NEM tokens for $532 million. While it remains unclear, whether other cryptocurrencies were stolen. NEM developers and the community of open source developers have confirmed that there will not be a hardfire for the restoration of lost funds. NEM Foundation President Lon Wong said that there should be no complaints against NEM, and laid overall responsibility for the incident at Coincheck.

 After breaking the largest Japanese exchange Coincheck announced the suspension of a number of services, including withdrawal of funds in all crypto and fiat currencies, including the Japanese yen. The suspension began when the exchange disconnected the possibility of replenishing the NEM crypto currency wallets, which it announced at 04:00 UTC. After 30 minutes, it was announced the ban on bidding NEM, the withdrawal of this cryptocurrency, and then the withdrawal of all the crypto and even the money of the fiat.

Nevertheless, at a press conference held in the afternoon, CEO Coincheck said that the exchange would not close and soon it would put all operations on hold. Plans to compensate for user losses, it did not sound.

Japan is the largest cryptocurrency exchange market globally, with daily trading volumes significantly larger than that of the US and South Korean markets. It also has a strict licensing program for cryptocurrency exchanges, which was created to ensure the quality of security measures and infrastructures employed by trading platforms.

Investors were taken aback by the hacking attack, as CoinCheck is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the Japanese market behind BitFlyer.

The CoinCheck hacking attack was reported to the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA), and various government agencies are expected to be involved in investigating the CoinCheck security breach.