JAPANESE AUTHORITIES WILL EXAMINE HOUSES OF CHANGE AFTER HACKING COINCHECK

The Financial Services Agency of Japan (FSA) announced that it will investigate all the exchange houses in the Asian country after the hacking perpetrated against Coincheck. He also reported that this exchange office must submit, before February 13, a detailed report on the recent hack and the measures it will take to prevent an event like this from happening again.

The Japanese authority also ordered Coincheck to improve its security standards and will inspect the other money exchange offices in the country to verify that they do not have any security breach that could give rise to hacking.

In recent days, Coincheck was the target of a hack in which 530 million dollars were stolen in XEM, the cryptocurrency of the NEM blockchain platform. According to the president of the NEM Foundation, Lon Wong, this has been "the biggest theft in the history of the world".

The NEM Foundation criticized that Coincheck did not use the intelligent multiple signature contract, which is used by all other exchange houses and makes illegitimate abduction even more difficult. Fortunately, Coincheck has accepted his mistake and decided to reimburse 90% of the money stolen in Japanese yen from his own accounts, although he did not say when he would.

At the time of the theft, the value of the main cryptocurrencies of the market decreased slightly, although in the following days it recovered. In relation to this, Genki Oda, president of the financial association BitPoint Japan, said that "all cryptocurrencies will now be contaminated in their minds [by clients], so there could be a negative impact in the medium term."

Japan has been a pioneer in the government adoption of cryptocurrencies and began a register of exchange houses in April of the previous year. However, Coincheck is still not approved. So far, the FSA has registered 16 exchange houses and another 16 are waiting for a response, among which is Coincheck, which made its application in September of last year. In any case, the authority allowed the exchange houses that provided services before beginning the registration, to continue their operations while waiting for a response to their application.