More than $2.3 million of the $32 million that was stolen from Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Bitpoint has been found and reabsorbed by the exchange. The news of the discovery first appeared in The Mainichi, a local English language newspaper.
The Cryptocurrencies were located across several exchanges outside of Japan that utilize trading systems provided by Bitpoint; according to the report, the discovery brings the total amount of losses down to roughly $28 million.
$23 million in user funds, $9.2 million in exchange funds were stolen last week
The news of Bitpoint’s hack originally broke on Friday, July 12th after an error in the exchange’s outgoing funds transfer system on Thursday night.
Within several hours, the exchange discovered that $23 million in user funds were missing, and an additional $9.2 million was missing from the exchange’s own reserves. Hackers spread their attack across four cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and XRP from the exchange’s hot (online) wallets.
Following the attack, Bitpoint suspended all trading, deposits, and withdrawals on the platform, and has not yet resumed the services. There are not yet any announcements with regards to when the exchange plans to continue its operations, or whether or not users will be reimbursed for their losses.
Bitcoin Analytics firm and AML/KYC provider Clain wrote on Twitter that some of the altcoins stolen from Bitpoint were laundered through Singapore-based exchange Huobi.
#bitpoint was hacked on Jul 11, 2019. #clain has detected the bitcoin addresses where the stolen funds were aggregated. Apparently, the part of the stolen alts was converted to BTC on #huobi exchange and landed on the same hacker's wallet. See below pics for more clarity. pic.twitter.com/CLFSxlNZ2g
— clain (@clain_io) July 12, 2019
Bitpoint’s parent company, Remixpoint, had plummeted 18.6% at the time of writing.
Bitpoint is one of the many exchanges that had been slapped with a business improvement order by the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) after applying for a license to continue its operations from the agency.
Since Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck was hacked for $530 million in January of 2018, the agency has only granted a handful of licenses. It appeared as though the agency might have been gaining momentum in granting the licensure last week due to the relaxation of restrictions placed on crypto exchange Bitlfyer, but the Bitpoint hack could give the agency a bit of pause.
Finance Magnates reported last week that over 100 cryptocurrency exchanges are currently in the process of applying for licensure from the FSA.
