Back in January CoinDaily reported on the cryptocurrency hack that cost Coincheck over $500 million. This is still the biggest theft in crypto history. The hackers stole New Economy Movement (NEM) tokens, each worth over $1.
CoinDaily’s Jessie Kerr wrote at the time:
“The little known blockchain based NEM currency is popular in Japan, with the JPY trading pair handling the most volume. Coincidentally, both Mt.Gox and Coincheck are based in Japan, so the country is once more suffering the shocking news of an incredible crypto theft.”
Tokyo-based Bloomberg reporter Yuji Nakamura said that Coincheck had not yet received an exchange license from Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA). The deadline was October, but the FSA had extended a grace period to the company.
The exchange has been sold since the hack and made key changes (twice at the urging of the Japanese government) to its operations, Japanese media reported today that Coincheck would be receiving a license after all by year’s end. It began taking on new clients back in the beginning of November.
Notably one the changes it made was the delisting of three privacy coins, Monero, Zcash, and Dash. Although the exchange has not said so, it’s likely that delisting these privacy coins haas a lot to do with the licensing process.
Coincheck has lost of a lot of customers and it’s volume has suffered as a result with only $22 million in volume over the past 24 hours, putting it in the middle of the list of top exchanges by volume. However, the licensing announcement is likely to re-position the exchange in the Japanese market, but fellow Asian exchange Binance continues to be the leader in the global market as a whole.
There are 200 other crypto businesses and exchanges in Japan are awaiting approval from the Japanese Financial Service Agency, according to Nikkei, which announced a framework for regulating ICOs earlier this year.
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