Just like real-life cash, cryptocurrency can be stolen as well. In fact last year $30 million worth of cryptocurrency had been stolen, which is a lot of money, but we reckon it pales in comparison to the latest theft. Japanese cryptocurrency exchange CoinCheck has confirmed that $530 million worth of cryptocurrency had been stolen from the platform.
The cryptocurrency in question is said to be NEM, which is another type of cryptocurrency. According to the firm, the money was stolen as it was kept in a “hot wallet”. For those unfamiliar, hot wallets and cold wallets are some of the ways that cryptocurrency is stored, in which the latter will see funds kept offline due to security reasons and to prevent hackers from accessing them.
However according to the CoinCheck team, they claim that managing the cold wallet was hard, which was why the NEM currencies were kept in the hot wallet. At this point in time it seems that only NEM was stolen and it is unclear if other cryptocurrencies that the platform trades in have been affected as well.
This news comes as a bit of a shock to investors as CoinCheck is said to be the largest cryptocurrency exchange in Japan.
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