As the cryptocurrency markets are still unregulated around the globe, it is of no surprise that every few months there is some sort of exchange hack in the news. This weekend was no different as we saw a relatively small South Korean exchange being hacked.
Translated: Currently, we are in discussions with coins to prevent damage, and it may not be possible to send some coins over the network. We will take action as fast as possible to avoid any harm to you.
Coinrail is a relatively small South Korean exchange with a trading volume of around 2 million USD per day just before the hack. Although the volume does not seem so big, this does put Coinrail in the top 90 exchanges based on volume. The amount of coins an exchange holds though is much higher than their actual volume. Let's have a look at what coins were targeted.
Most of the coins stolen were NPXS (Pundi X)
NPXS (Pundi X) was the most affected out of all the currencies on the exchange. The hackers managed withdraw $19.5 million-worth of NPXS tokens, they also took $13.8 million from Aston X, $5.8 million worth in DENT tokens and $1.1 million worth of Tron tokens. This information has been identified by following this wallet address. The hacker also managed to get away with some smaller amounts of other tokens.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal posted a report mentioning that U.S regulators are investigating possible price manipulation by four of the major cryptocurrency exchanges: Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit and Kraken.
The hack caused the market to dip below $300 billion once again
The results were that we saw an overall red weekend for the cryptocurrency markets. The total capitalization dropped below $300 Bln. The last time the market was below $300 Bln was on April the 12th. Bitcoin reached a low of $6,647.33 and Ethereum reached $496.53.
Exchanges getting hacked is nothing new. This is just the latest in a series of hacks. This year we saw one of the biggest hacks of all, Coincheck a Japanese exchange lost an amount close to $400 million, Tether claimed that they had lost around $31 million following an attack and also Etherdelta had stopped its services during December after it was hacked. The mother of all bitcoin hacks is still the Mt. Gox hack that happened in 2013 where 744k BTC was stolen, which with todays bitcoin valuation would be around $5.4 billion, at the time it was worth $350 million.