Bitpoint lost $32 million and suspended all services on Friday in the latest breach of a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange.
Parent company Remixpoint said that $23 million of the stolen funds belonged to Bitpoint customers, while the remainder belonged to the exchange itself. The company will compensate customers for the losses.
Following the news of the hacking incident, Remixpoint shares dropped 19%.
Bitpoint reported that the attackers stole funds in five cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ripple, and Ethereal.
On Friday morning, the Bitpoint Exchange suspended services of all crypto assets, including trading, deposit, and withdrawal, in order to investigate the hack.
The company said that hackers stole funds from both its hot and cold wallets, revealing that the network was thoroughly comprised.
Hot wallets are used to store funds for current transactions and cold wallets are offline devices used to store emergency and long-term funds.
Cryptocurrency has been a legal form of payment in Japan since April 2017.
Bitpoint is one of the large-scale Japanese-based cryptocurrency exchanges to suffer a major hack during the past few years. In May, the crypto exchange Binance suffered $40 million in losses due to being hacked.
In September 2018, Zaif, a licensed exchange under the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) was hacked for $60 million in cryptocurrencies. When Coincheck was hacked in January 2018, more than $530 million worth of cryptocurrencies were stolen.
Bitpoint was one of many crypto exchanges to have been served a business improvement order from the FSA during its wide-ranging inspections of industry businesses, according to Bloomberg.
The FSA said that 110 exchanges are reportedly trying to get licenses in Japan and are in “various stages of registration.”
In 2018, the FSA did not grant approval for any cryptocurrency exchanges to begin operating in the country, according to reports. The year before the agency had approved 16 new exchanges.