Coincheck hacked for $500m even Larger than Mt Gox theft

Breaking news from Tokyo

The Japanese exchange coincheck  has announced that is has been hacked in what is the largest theft hacking of the Crypto industry so far. TV stations in Japan streamed footage of small groups of exchange customers waiting outside the Coincheck offices in Tokyo on Friday night, awaiting further news of the scandal.

Japanese TV footage showed a small group of customers standing outside the company’s Tokyo head office Friday night.

Coinchecks executive president Wakata Koichi Yoshihiro stated that approximately $533 million has been stolen (58billion yen) from the exchange in NEM tokens. This equates to 500 Million NEM and they were stolen from Coinchecks digital wallets.

In tweets made by Nikkei is seems to show that the exact amount stolen may not be totally know until deeper investigations have been made into the intrusion. Though the precise $ amount is hard to know at this stage the figure is said to be 400-500 million dollars’ worth of NEM. The devaluation to $400 million could come with the devaluation to NEM following the theft.

When the incident when to press at 23:30 JST the price of XEM had gone down to $0.85 , from a high of $1.01 that day. This theft is even greater than the massive MT GOX hacking scandal in 2014, which was said to be valued at $340 million, but the overall impact on the crypto market will likely be smaller due to the huge increase in market capitalisation since that time.

Coincheck froze most of its services since the news brokw and announced on its website that (at 13:00 jst) it had locked deposits , and any trading or removal of XEM which is the actual sale token that currently runs on the NEM blockchain. Following that announcement a larger suspension of any currency withdrawls or trading was added around half an hour later.Further still, an hour later everything was locked down apart from the resilient Bitcoin.

This was said to include any other deposit methods like debit or credit card.

Coincheck has said it will look into compensating its clients, but has revealed they are not registered with the FSA of Japan, although now plans to do so, the chief president of Coincheck Koichiro Wada has stated he “deeply regretted the issue”.