NEM Hack Victims to be Compensated by Coincheck Next Week
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck recently announced that it will start paying customers who were affected by the $530 million NEM theft in January, as soon as next week.
Coincheck, which is a Tokyo-based exchange operator, declared earlier today that it will start compensating users who were affected by the theft by next week. Even while details were not provided, speaking at a press conference today, Koichiro Wada who is Coincheck’s CEO and operations chief Yusuke Otsuka said they will provide more information in the next days.
The executives, on the 26th of January, confirmed popular rumours of a significant theft of about 526 million NEM tokens, which was approximately $530 million at the time, which has since become the largest cryptocurrency robbery of all time. Although suspending a short-term freeze on fiat withdrawals in February- users withdrew about 40.1 billion JPY ($372 million) in one day.
Japan’s financial regulator, the Financial Services Agency (FSA), stated it would enhance its analysis of local exchanges in the days right after the robbery with on-site examinations.
Japanese exchanges are expected to register with the Financial Services Agency and abide by regulations to run in the country, following recent legal guidelines that effectively acknowledged bitcoin as a method of payment from April 2017. So far, 16 out of 32 domestic exchanges have registered, with Coincheck permitted to run among the other half since the law was preceded. The agency has since then finished its initial phase of examinations and is gearing up to apply punishments against exchanges which might include suspension requests.
Coincheck, on the other hand, asserts it is still optimistic about getting a permit from the FSA after obtaining a ‘business improvement order’ from the regulator today. Executives from Coincheck insisted the exchange will resume listing and trading cryptocurrencies this coming week, at the same time suggesting that the NEM robbery happened after cyber-terrorists got into an employee’s computer through a malware.
