Cryptocurrency hacks are so frequent that I would be surprised if you told me a day had passed without one happening.
And so it is with almost no sense of shock, horror or alarm that Finance Magnates can report a Polish Exchange has now shut down.
Bitmarket, which was apparently the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in Poland, suddenly stopped operations on Tuesday.
The company's website is now completely dead. All that remains is a message, written in both Polish and English, that says the following;
"Dear Users, We regret to inform you that due to the loss of Liquidity , since 08/07/2019, Bitmarket.pl/net was forced to cease its operations. We will inform you about further steps."
Bitmarket warning signs
It is unclear as to exactly what "loss of liquidity" means and why it said the exchange had to close down.
Some Reddit users, however, did suggest that the exchange might have been hacked.
According to a thread on the site discussing Bitmarket's demise, the exchange had been acting strangely for the past few weeks.
For instance, they asked users to change their passwords but never provided any reason as to why that was necessary. They also made additional KYC requirements, asking users to scan and photograph certain documents. Again, no reason for their doing this was given.
As recently as yesterday the firm was posting on its Twitter page, but early on Tuesday morning, its data feed to CoinMarketCap stopped working.
If Bitmarket is down because of a hack, it will become the latest in a slew of cryptocurrency exchanges to suffer at the hands of cybercriminals.
Even giants in the space, such as Binance, have been affected by criminals.
Others, most infamously QuadrigaCX, have closed so suddenly and with almost no explanation, leaving their former customers to wonder or not they were duped.
