Bitcoin exchanges have always been a prominent target for hackers and other criminals. Korea is home to quite a few bitcoin exchanges, although most people have no idea they exist in the first place. Yapizon, one of the Koran exchanges, has allegedly been hacked, resulting in a loss of 3,831 bitcoin. That is not good news by any means, as it is expected criminals will sell these coins on exchanges over the coming days.
Yapizon Exchange Has Been Breached
This news was officially communicated to Yapizon exchange e users, although it was only made public late last night. The Korean exchange informed its users of how a breach has been detected on April 22nd, affecting all of the exchange’s four hot wallets. It is believed 3,831 bitcoin have been successfully stolen by the criminals over the course of one hour, although it remains a bit unclear what has happened exactly.
At the time, the stolen money was equal to 37.08% of the Yapizon holdings. That is quite a big amount of money gone missing, to say the least. Yapizon will take the same approach as Bitfinex did last year, by reducing account balances of all users and issuing IOU tokens in exchange. Whether or not they will ever be able to repay their customers in full, remains anybody’s guess at this point, though.
Moreover, the exchange has halted all deposits and withdrawals for a few days until they can assess the full scale of the damage done by this attack. It is expected this functionality will be restored in the coming days, although no official date has been communicated just yet. Rest assured Yapizon users are very concerned about this incident, and not many people will be too happy about seeing their account balances deducted by 37.08%.
What is rather interesting is how the official statement makes a mention of all company staffers abandoning the property right of the company as much as possible. This is done to minimize user losses, although the company remains hopeful they can recover most of the stolen funds in the coming months. For now, the company will pay users back by using the Fei service product. This Fei will grant users a percentage of commissions generated by the exchange platform moving forward.
This is another clear example of why centralized bitcoin exchanges continue to pose a risk to the overall ecosystem. Centralized platforms can be hacked – which happens rather often – resulting in users losing funds. Bitcoin holders should always transfer their holdings to a wallet they fully control at all times, rather than leaving it in an exchange wallet.
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