Tech
Japan’s DMM Bitcoin says over 48 billion yen in cryptocurrency has been lost
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM Bitcoin said on Friday it had lost 4,502.9 bitcoins, worth about 48.2 billion yen ($308 million), in what the company called an “unidentified data leak”. authorized”.
It gave no details about how the incident occurred or whether an outside party was involved, but said it was investigating and had limited some services in response.
Cryptocurrency companies are frequent targets of hacking and cyberattacks, although losses of this scale are rare.
DMM Bitcoin said it will replace customers’ lost bitcoin deposits with the help of other group companies.
The Financial Services Agency has asked the company to investigate the incident, NHK said.
Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of cryptocurrency research firm Elliptic, said that if the DMM leak turns out to be a theft, it would be the eighth largest cryptocurrency theft of all time, based on trading rates. change in the moment in which it occurred.
It would be the largest since the $477 million hack suffered by FTX in November 2022, he added.
Cryptocurrency news outlet CoinDesk said the DMM loss was the second largest ever suffered by the region, after $530 million in cryptocurrency was stolen from Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck in 2018.
About $1.7 billion was stolen from various cryptocurrency platforms last year, cryptocurrency research firm Chainalysis said.