The Coincheck was attacked, a lot of NEMs were stolen. Is it the end for NEM?

[GR92]

Coincheck, a popular Japanese cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed on Friday that it has fallen victim to one of the biggest cryptocurrency hacks in digital currency history, a crypto heist that tops the notorious 2014 Mt. Gox incident.

During a late-night press conference, Coincheck president Wakata Koichi and Chief Operating Officer Yusuke Otsuka estimated the exchange had lost at least $400 million worth of the NEM cryptocurrency’s XEM tokens.

As a result, Coincheck has halted all operations and the price of XEM has tumbled nearly 10 percent at the time of writing. NEM is the tenth largest cryptocurrency according to CoinMarketCap.

Lax security measures protecting this smaller cryptocurrency seem to be at the root of this issue. Yuji Nakamura, a Bloomberg tech reporter based in Tokyo, attended the Coincheck press conference and tweeted the exchange was not using multi-signature — an additional layer of security for cryptocurrency transaction — for XEM transfers.

[ManaMan]

MTGOX was not end of bitcoin so for sure coincheck breach would not have some huge impact on the whole scene of crypto, it could just raise awareness of urgent need of higher level of security and this could potentially be good indicator to wake up others who know their systems are not secure enough.

[DimaS1574]

The total Market cap of this coin is $9 545 759 999   
it is about 5% from total amount,  to my mind it wil not  make so huge influence on total currency value

[John Langut]

That exchange has made so much profit from trading and listing fees they can easily refund the people who lost their NEM out of their own pocket. Which they will do, in yen.

I hope other exchanges crank up their security a notch after this hack though.

[Washball]

This was indeed a serious blow for NEM and for the cryptocurrency space in general. Mt. Gox was already a hard blow, this attack is even harder. These hacks and ICO scams are a real threat to the continuation of cryptocurrencies. Maybe governments and financial institutions cannot stop crypto, but hackers and scammers definitely could bring crypto to an end.

[John Langut]

If crypto is vulnerable to hackers, then crypto needs to be hardended. I'm not a NEM expert, but isn't one of the features of cryptocurrencies the blockchain? We can trace every transaction, we just need a way to prevent stolen coins from being laundered. Regulation doesn't prevent hacks. The solution against hacks will have to come from the technology itself.