Leading Japanese Exchange Hit By Hackers: $100M Has Been Stolen

The leading Japanese exchange for cryptocurrencies Liquid is in the latest Bitcoin scams news, where a group of hackers managed to steal around $100,000,000 from the company’s assets. The exchange announced that some of its digital currency wallets have been “compromised.”

 The company said “We are sorry to announce that #LiquidGlobal warm wallets were compromised, we are moving assets into the cold wallet.”

For those of you who don’t know or don’t follow our latest cryptocurrencies news, the so-called ‘warm’ or ‘hot’ digital wallets are wallets based online, created to allow users to access their crypto in an easier way. On the other hand, ‘cold’ wallets are offline and harder to access, which essentially makes them more secure.

The blockchain analytics company Eliptic noted that around $97 million in cryptocurrencies had been taken from the leading Japanese exchange, with BTC and ETH being the main tokens amongst the haul.

Liquid also mentioned that they are actively tracing the movement of the stolen cryptocurrencies and working with other exchanges to freeze and recover their assets. The exchange has been operating since 2014 and is active in over 100 countries, serving millions of customers around the world. It is also one of the top 20 largest cryptocurrency exchanges based on its daily trading volumes.

The news follow the heist of $600 million which was recorded last week, reported by the digital token platform Poly Network.

“The amount of money you have hacked is one of the biggest in defi [decentralised finance] history,” Poly Network said.

The hacker who goes under the name of Mr. White Hat, has since then, returned around $427 million of the assets. However, there is no update on whether the leading Japanese exchange Liquid is going to see a similar scenario.

If we go back in time, in 2014, we can see that the Tokyo-based exchange MtGox collapsed after almost $500 million in BTC went missing, which was one of the biggest frauds in the cryptocurrency market at the time. Similarly, Coincheck was hacked in a $530 million heist in 2018.

Hacks are common and one of the things that still make exchanges insecure from an investor’s perspective. We will continue to update you on the latest news regarding this case.