Funds Stolen From Cryptopia Frozen By Binance

Following news of the Cryptopia hack, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, Binance, has frozen some of the funds which were stolen from the New Zealand crypto exchange during a hack which was reported earlier in the week.

Binance provides a platform for trading more than a hundred different digital currencies and is getting ready to support the upcoming Constantinople hard fork on the Ethereum network. Since the start of last year, Binance is seen as the biggest exchange in the world in terms of its trading numbers.

As many people know, the CEO of Binance is Changpeng Zhao (CZ) and through his official Twitter account announced that Binance had halted certain funds which were stolen from the New Zealand crypto exchange. In the message, CZ has wondered why the attackers are carrying on to send the stolen funds to Binance.

As most people will have heard by now, Cryptopia reported that there had been a hack on Monday which has resulted in ‘significant losses’. The damage amounted to Ethereum worth at least $2.4 million in several unknown wallets. On top of this, he moved to centralised management in the amount of around $1.2 million.

Community reaction

After CZ tweeted his message on Twitter, there was a lot of backlash from the online community. In the CEOs tweet, he advised cryptographic owners to keep ahold of their assets on stock exchanges. This is opposed to having them on personal storage devices such as hardware wallets or USB drives. As reported by AtozMarkets, some members of the community perceived CZ’s tweet as a “meaning that the risk of self-preservation is significantly higher than the risk of storing cryptocurrency on “reputable” exchanges, such as Binance, for example. However, Zhao later said that he did not necessarily advise investors to keep funds on the exchanges.”

Growth In Attacks

There seems to have been a growth in attacks on exchanges over recent years. For the first half of 2018, there were over 730 million dollars exchanges for the exchanges of hacks. Quite a lot of the loss - $500 million - occurred as a result of a Coincheck hack in January last year.

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