Today I’m writing a little more calmly and without any distress about what happened on our cryptocurrency exchange platform, Binance Exchange.
At first the news startled me, but seeing the prompt response and the blocking of part of the cybercriminal’s loot put me at ease. Although I must confess that those of us who have been at this for a while aren’t very startled or affected by these kinds of events, since we’ve already been hardened by so many experiences in this field. And one of
One of the events I remember most was what happened with Cryptopia. In 2014 and 2015, it was the great crypto guru (to borrow a phrase from a friend and colleague), and it experienced substantial growth in 2017, going from 30,000 users to more than 1.4 million in 2018. In January 2019, Cryptopia was the victim of a high-profile theft that resulted in the loss of approximately 10% of its cryptocurrency assets, then valued at 24 million New Zealand dollars. The incident has been described as one of the largest thefts in New Zealand's history, leaving everyone who had cryptocurrencies in its vaults—assets earned through their hard work—in limbo. Cryptopia went from one day to the next with no announcements, just reports sent by email saying that its platform had been hacked.
All the money that was there—every last bit of it—was frozen, just like our minds, and it wasn't until weeks later that the platform's first messages to its users appeared.
It took Cryptopia years to make payouts, and even today, 30-10-2026, they are still paying out the little they could to those of us who had put our faith in it. The saddest thing is that in the end, it wasn't a hack. It was the programmers themselves, along with the New Zealand government, who took the loot.
What happened next? After this event, the exchange had some very large investors who, through their organization, formed a consortium to fight for their funds. We “benefited” from this too, along with a few other smaller investors, but in the end we suffered huge losses or lost almost everything.
In addition to the cases above, there have been cases such as the one involving the company Bitget, which lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while the manipulation of Ledger devices also caused losses in the millions. Another recent and well-known case was the collapse of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried's platform, in November 2022. Finally, perhaps the most notorious hacking incident: the Japan-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was attacked in 2011.
All the recent cases, problems, hacks, and scams have made us tougher and taught us that this market isn't easy.
But not everything is bad or lost. There are now companies that safeguard, protect, look after, and monitor those who are always trying to attack what works. There is great collaboration between exchanges and developers in the
industry. The proof is that as soon as this incident occurred, the stablecoins USDT and USDC held by the cybercriminal were frozen, and the wallets where the criminals hold the other stolen cryptocurrencies have now been identified.
To conclude, I am optimistic about this market, and I believe that by now nothing can limit what has been achieved through the crypto world.
