World’s Sixth Largest Cyptocurrency Exchange Bithumb Hacked

By Ravindra Chagetha

On 20th June 2018, South Korea-based cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb announced the temporarily suspension of deposit and withdrawal services after unfortunate incident of stealing of about $30 million worth of cryptocurrency.

In one of the recent tweets, the Seoul-based operator said that the stolen coins would be covered from Bithumb’s own reserves and to do so, every single user’s asset will be transferred to safer “cold wallet”.

Bithumb has apologized for the inconvenience caused and will notify about restart of the service very soon. Because of this event, Bitcoin fell from about $6,718.35 to as low as $6,561.79. However, following the tweets from Bithumb, there has been a recovery in the price as at 10:03 a.m. HK/SIN, Bitcoin traded at $6,614.46.

Today, South Korea is the key cryptocurrency trading center and undoubtedly Bithumb is one of the demanding virtual coin exchanges. Just few weeks back, a relatively small South Korean exchange, Coinrail, tweeted that it had been hacked, and surprisingly noticed that lesser-known cryptocurrencies such as Pundi X were amongst those affected. Many market experts said that the hacking news too affected Bitcoin and resulted in the drop of its price to its lowest in two months. Still, given the relative size of Coinrail, today that claim proved unconvincing.

In fact, a Wall Street Journal report also said that U.S. regulators were also involved in examining the manipulation of price at four major cryptocurrency exchanges. Luckily, Bitcoin, and Ethereum established a boost after a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made an official statement stating that neither of those crypto assets are securities. Also, the SEC announced that many, but not all, initial coin offerings could be securities and there is a possibility that it would fall under the regulatory control of the SEC and applicable securities laws.

Ravindra Chagetha

His interests and the desire to learn something new cannot be neglected as he is always keen to learn new things.

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