Technology
Japan's DMM Bitcoin Says More Than $300 Million in Crypto Was Lost
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese cryptocurrency exchange DMM Bitcoin said on Friday it had lost 4,502.9 bitcoins, worth about 48.2 billion yen or $308 million, in what the company called an "unauthorized leak." .
It did not give details of how the incident occurred or whether an outside party had been involved, but said it was investigating and had restricted some services in response.
Cryptocurrency companies are frequent targets of hacks and cyberattacks, although losses of this scale are rare.
DMM Bitcoin said it would replace customers' lost Bitcoin deposits with the help of other companies in the group.
Japan's Financial Services Agency demanded that the company investigate the incident, public broadcaster NHK said.
Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of cryptocurrency research firm Elliptic, said that if the DMM loss turned out to be a theft, it would be the eighth-largest cryptocurrency theft of all time, based on exchange rates at the time. what happened.
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 the region had experienced 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.
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