Bitcoin Crashed After Another Crypto Exchange Got Hacked
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The alleged attacker appeared to have stolen more than $40 million worth of cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin fell more than 10% Monday to its lowest price in two months, after a relatively small crypto exchange in South Korea reported a hack. The crash widens bitcoin’s year-to-date losses to as much as 50%, wiping about $120 billion off its market value this year.
Coinrail, which is among the world’s top 100 crypto exchanges by trading volume, said in a statement that some of the lesser-known cryptocurrencies, such as NPXS, belonging to its users were stolen by hackers. It said it had frozen the tokens that were stolen and halted all trading across the exchange to help with a police investigation.
Although Coinrail didn’t specify the value of the heist, a wallet address that has been linked to the alleged attacker appeared to have stolen more than $40 million worth of cryptocurrency, TechCrunch noted.
Other major cryptocurrencies including ethereum and ripple also tumbled, with about $45 billion wiped off the total crypto-market value in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
About $1.1 billion worth of cryptocurrency has been stolen by hackers in the first half of this year, according to a recent report from cybersecurity company Carbon Black.
The price plunges were also linked to a report on Friday from the Wall Street Journal that U.S. regulators are investigating four major crypto exchanges, including Coinbase and Bitstamp, for price manipulation.