Bithumb Officially Announces $30 Million Theft, Full Reimbursement to Investors
South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Bithumb, on June 20, withdrew its announcement of the stolen $30 million from the hack on its exchange, which raised fear amongst investors. Today, June 21, Bithumb announced that $30 million was stolen and the figure might drop further following different recovery efforts.
On Wednesday, the Bithumb team confirmed on different social media platforms that the exchange was hacked and resulted in a loss of approximately $30 million in digital assets. The report reads:
“We checked that some of the cryptocurrencies valued about $30,000,000 were stolen. Those stolen cryptocurrencies will be covered from Bithumb and all of the assets are being transferred to a cold wallet.”
Yet, shortly after the announcement, Bithumb withdrew its comments without giving any explanation on the situation. To various users, Bithumb spokesperson noted that the firm withdrew the statement after it was advised by regulators to carry out a detailed investigation into the security hack first before issuing an official statement.
The firm announced today that it had lost $30 million in the hack and its developers and security team have begun the recovery process of customer assets.
“After the incident occurred on June 20, Bithumb quickly followed the procedure to immediately report [the] incident to KISA announcing that about 35 billion Korean Won worth amount of cryptocurrency was stolen. However, as we undergo recovery process on each cryptocurrency, the overall scale of damage is getting reduced. Hence, we expect that the overall damage will be less than the amount we initially expected,” the Bithumb team said.
The $30 million amount announced by Bithumb is an approximate amount of funds that were at risk to the hack. Following an investigation carried out with The Korea Internet & Security, a sub-organization of the Ministry of Science and ICT, Bithumb developers and security experts discovered a way to regain part of the stolen money.
As the demand for cryptocurrency is rising at a very fast rate, industry experts and regulators have asked investors to use major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Bithumb, UPbit, and Korbit to prevent falling victim to attacks.
The recent Bithumb hack indicates the need of using major cryptocurrency exchanges given that the firm has officially announced that it will give full reimbursement to investors.
“Bithumb has been administering company’s asset and customers’ asset, and all customers’ cryptocurrencies, as well as KRW asset, are safely stored on a cold wallet and bank respectively. Moreover, we would like to ensure that Bithumb currently has about 500 billion KRW worth of company’s fund. The amount of damage that occurred this time will be fully covered by Bithumb’s own company fund.”
Towards the close of 2017, Bithumb revealed its cryptocurrency holdings to be more than a billion dollars and its net profit in 2017 to be about $300 million. On June 21, Bithumb announced that it presently has about $450 million in company fund at its disposal and it will be able to make full compensation to investors without any constraints once the investigation is concluded.
