Cybersecurity
Hacked Crypto Exchange Earned $490 Million Before Epic Heist
- Coincheck made the money in 10 months before $500 million hack
- Figures show how lucrative Bitcoin bubble was for bourses
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Running a cryptocurrency exchange can be enormously profitable -- so long as you don’t lose your clients’ assets to hackers.
Japan-based Coincheck Inc., which suffered one of the biggest heists in history, earned 53.2 billion yen ($490 million) from April 2017 through January, when the theft occurred, according to its new owner Monex Group Inc. By comparison, Japan Exchange Group, which owns the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Osaka Exchange, earned 66.1 billion yen for all of 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.