Hacks and scams can never be completely stopped. Seems that market has learned to take this fact in its stride.
There was a time ...in 2014, when Mt. Gox Exchange was robbed off of over $450M in the biggest hack in crypto history. It almost grinded the whole of crypto industry to a halt.
However, another big hack of about $500M of Japanese Exchange CoinCheck happened around the last bull run in January, 2018.
But last night when Kucoin Exchange was hacked for c.$200M, crypto market didn't appear to react to this news.
We don't know the exact figure of hack. But since this single a/c has about $160M, I can guess, if we add up all other blockchain coins including BTC, it should easily go over $200M. This probably makes it 3rd largest crypto Exchange hack in the history.
News have it that hackers got access to private keys of Exchange's hot wallet and almost swept it off completely.
But why BTC or ETH prices ain't taking note of this event?
I think the market has matured enough to discount such hacks. On top of it, KuCoin CEO Johnny Lyu appeared on a live stream within hours of the hack and assured everyone that customer funds are completely covered by an insurance fund. And they are also trying their best to recover the fund in close association with law authorities and most major crypto exchanges.
Thus Exchange has taken full responsibility of its losses accrued through this hack. Check their official post on this issue for details.
Therefore, most people are convinced that customers won't suffer because of this hack except the lose of time. KuCon has disabled all customer withdrawals with immediate effect. And we hope it will be re-enabled soon. So it just seems a matter of time for its customers to get access back to their funds.
When Binance was hacked, it set an example of putting aside some reserves for such incidents. Although it couldn't recover its hacked funds, all customer funds were "safu". The withdrawals were active within just a couple of weeks of hack. Bigger Excahnges don't want to tarnish their image and spoil their business So the customers of bigger Exchanges comparatively feels safer these days.
- Do you have any funds with KuCoin?
- How do you feel after this hack about using this Exchange in future?