The Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck suffered the theft of $400m following a successful hack into its system. The company is promising to repay its customers, 260,000 of them, who lost money in the digital heist. It claims to know the digital address of where the ‘coins’ were sent, but it’s not yet clear if this will be enough to ensure their recovery. The news comes at a difficult time for cryptocurrencies as governments around the world are weighing up how to regulate such this new breed of financial instruments. After the value of Bitcoin shot up over the past year, market watchers have warned that government oversight was one of the factors that could cause the price to crash once again. As it happens, Coincheck had been operating on borrowed time, as it was overdue to receive its license to trade legally under new Japanese rules set in place to monitor cryptocurrency exchanges.
