Bitpoint Reveals More Details on the Hack, Plans to Reimburse Users

Bitpoint might be down, but the cryptocurrency exchanges are definitely not out, and it is working tirelessly to get itself back on its feet following the sad events of last week. Yesterday, the parent company of the Japanese exchange, RemixPoint gave a breakdown of the digital assets stolen last week.

As was revealed in the press release that reported the hack, the hot wallets owned by Bitpoint contained five crypto assets; Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), XRP, Litecoin (LTC), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The company reported that a vast majority of the assets stolen were XRP tokens.
What we didn’t know was the quantity of the XRP coins stolen as compared to the other assets in the exchange’s bitcoin wallets.

According to the document published by the Remixpoint, XRP accounted for the bulk of the stolen funds. More specifically, there were 28,106,343 XRP tokens ($8,712,966), 5,108 LTC ($444,396), 11,169 ETH ($2,323,152), 1,985 BCH ($573665), and 1,225 BTC tokens ($11,791,850) (all prices are accurate at press time)

The total worth of assets taken from the firm amounted to 3.02 billion yen (about $27.8 million at the time of the hack). Out of this, 2.06 billion yen belonged to the exchange’s clients, while the exchange itself lost 960 million yen of its own assets as well. Affected clients numbered roughly 50,000 in total; almost half of its 110,000 strong clientele.

In addition to providing more insights into the assets pilfered by the criminals, Bitpoint and its parent company used the document to reassure all affected users that they would be compensated. As expected, customers would be reimbursed in crypto assets, not their fiat equivalents, as some might have hoped.

Bitpoint reaffirmed its belief that the hack was possible because the perpetrators had gotten unauthorized access into their hot wallets. To combat events of this nature in the future, the exchange confirmed that all of its holdings would be moved into the more secure cold storage going forward.

In the report, Bitpoint assured users of the cold wallets storage, saying that it examined the cold wallet after the hack and found that it hadn’t been breached.

All activities were suspended in the wake of the hack, including withdrawals, deposits, and cryptocurrency stock trading. The exchange informed users that these activities will remain suspended until they can effectively monitor the situation, perform comprehensive security measures, and begin work on finding the lost assets.

As for the latter two objectives, Bitpoint Assured users that they are already working with the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA)- a self-regulatory, exchange-constituted body that was established to help ensure investor protection and security standards across the industry- to monitor all exchanges for any suspected wallets associated with the security breach.

It has also made some progress in the third front. On Monday, local news medium The Mainichi reported that Bitpoint had been able to find 250 million yen (about $2,3 million) already, after looking through a few foreign-based exchanges that made use of its trading system.