The unfortunate hack on the New Zeeland based exchange Cryptopia has revealed both positive and less positive news. To start with the good news, the exchange resumed trading on over 40 trade pairs. However, clients suffered some losses on some of the major coins.

Cryptopia opens up for trading – good news?

Cryptocurrencies are a fairly new phenomenon and a hacker’s paradise. Cryptopia was one of the most recent victims. A few months ago, the exchange shut down their webpage because of a hacking incident. Clients were unaware of the damage, but an analyst estimated that the hackers could have got away with around $16 million in ether and Erc-20 tokens.

Nevertheless, The New Zeeland based exchange was finally able to share some good news on Twitter. Its users could finally start to trade over 40 trading pairs, and Cryptopia will allow more pairs are moving forward. They shared a list over the available pairs, and it seems as though pairs against bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) are first out.

However, even though clients were happy about the news they were met with some bad as well when they logged in. The hacker got away with a large amount of money which was reflected in users wallets. Reddit users shared losses, and user Athanor25 revealed that he lost 100% on ETH, 43% on LTC and 14% on BTC.

Meanwhile, the exchange ensures its users that the incident was not an exit scam and all its clients have a new token in their wallets, Cryptopia Loss Marker (CLM). It represents the same amount as the user lost and Cryptopia will eventually reimburse its customers. They wrote:

“CLM is not a coin, and it can’t be traded as yet, it is just a number in the database that represents the loss for each coin for each user in $NZD at the time of the event. There are still steps to take to ensure we are taking a legal path toward reimbursement.“

Cryptopia only one example out of many

The decentralised and unregulated nature of the cryptocurrency market is a hackers paradise. Unfortunately, Cryptopia is only one example. A few weeks ago, a hacker got away with 2,09 million EOS which at the time was worth around $7,7 million.

Another example is the Japanese exchange Zaif who lost $60 million to hackers. One of the later stories, covered by Toshi Times, is QuadrigaCX. The exchange was not a victim to hackers but rather an exit scam. The founder died, and the founds are mysteriously Missing.

The point is, when entering the cryptocurrency market, it is important to do your due diligence on both exchanges and wallets. The famous Andreas Antonopoulos argued that you need a wallet to keep your cryptocurrencies safe. He said:

”Your Keys, Your Bitcoin. Not Your Keys, Not Your Bitcoin”.



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