Cryptocurrencies lose US$42b mart value after Coinrail hack

SINGAPORE: The 2018 selloff in cryptocurrencies deepened, wiping out US$42 billion (RM167.47 billion) of market value over the weekend and extending this year’s slump in Bitcoin to more than 50 per cent.

Some observers pinned the retreat on an exchange hack in South Korea, while others pointed to lingering concerns over a clampdown on trading platforms in China.

Bitcoin has dropped 12 per cent since 5pm in New York on Friday and was trading at US$6,765.54 as of 2.49pm in Hong Kong yesterday, bringing its year-to-date loss to 53 per cent.

Most other major virtual currencies also retreated, sending the market value of digital assets tracked by Coinmarketcap.com to a nearly two-month low of US$298 billion. At the height of the global crypto-mania in early January, they were worth about US$830 billion.

Enthusiasm for virtual currencies has waned partly due to a string of cyber heists, including the nearly US$500 million theft from Japanese exchange Coincheck Inc in late January.

While the latest hacking target — a South Korean venue called Coinrail — was much smaller, the news triggered knee-jerk selling, according to Stephen Innes, head of Asia Pacific trading at Oanda Corp, here. “This is ‘If it can happen to A, it can happen to B and it can happen to C’, then people panic because someone is selling.”

Coinrail said in a statement on its website yesterday some of the exchange’s digital currency appeared to have been stolen by hackers, but it didn’t disclose how much.

Two-thirds of the stolen assets — which the exchange identified as NPXS, NPER and ATX coins — had been frozen or collected, while the remaining one third was being examined by investigators, other exchanges and cryptocurrency development companies, it said.