Japanese site Coincheck announced a few days ago that it lost over 500 million NEM tokens worth over $500 million.
The company admitted that it suffered a security breach from hackers and immediately notified authorities. Coincheck employees are currently considering a method to compensate some users who suffered cryptocurrency losses.
Users began to suspect that something was amiss after Coincheck suspended NEM deposits without warning, then all NEM transactions, and a few hours later banned all payments on its entire website. According to current information, the hackers only stole NEM tokens, a cryptocurrency that was recently launched but had the 10thposition in the digital currency market (at the time). Its price dropped from $1 to $0.8 after the hack was announced, and it is believed that almost 7% of all NEM tokens in circulation today were stolen.
Kaspersky researcher Costin Raiu also noted that Coincheck moved $110 million worth of Ripple (XRP) cryptocurrencies. The company did not report any loss of Ripple cryptocurrency, and some users speculated that the company simply moved the coins to a safer location to protect them from possible theft, in case the malicious user still had access to their systems.
In the annals of cryptocurrency exchange hacking, the Coincheck incident is now the largest ever, surpassing Mt. Gox from 2014, when hackers stole $450 million worth of Bitcoin.
For information, Coincheck was founded in 2014 and all of this took place shortly before it obtained a license from the Japanese government to operate as a legal cryptocurrency exchange site in the country.
