U.S.A.: This week, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed the sale of more than 3,600 bitcoin — roughly $31 million at current prices — to five winning bids in a recent auction. This is the first auction of seized bitcoin since 2016, when the agency sold the remaining 2,700 bitcoins of the 144,000 BTC seized from […]
In a stunning announcement made earlier today, Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck revealed that the company was the victim of the largest cryptocurrency heist in history. According to a report published by Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun (and translated by Coindesk), the hackers made off with over 500 million NEM (XEM) tokens, worth roughly $535 million (58 […]
Since late November 2017, South Korea has looked to regulate cryptocurrency trading in domestic exchanges. South Korea’s primary financial regulator is in discussions with counterparts in China and Japan toward the regulation of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. South Korea is the world’s third largest market in bitcoin trading, after Japan and the U.S., and the largest […]
Is bitcoin finally gaining traction in Japan? Even before the collapse of Mt.Gox, the country has been equal parts skeptical and disinterested in the cryptocurrency concept. In June, the country’s ruling party issued a statement claiming that there was no need to create bitcoin regulation, referring to the Japanese bitcoin industry as a “sprout.” If […]
San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is no stranger to the international bitcoin market. Although the company is based in the U.S., the exchange doesn’t do much business in dollars, preferring instead to avoid the finicky, risk-averse, account-closure prone American banking system as much as possible. While most of its business is in euros, Kraken’s founder […]
In a report published today by the Wall Street Journal‘s MoneyBeat blog, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department said it was launching a formal investigation into the loss of nearly 850,000 bitcoins from the long-shuttered Mt.Gox exchange. Given the size of the heist, and the extraordinary level of coverage the collapse of Mt.Gox has seen both […]
A closed-door meeting of Mt.Gox customers and other creditors held today in Tokyo provided little solace to those who lost their funds on the shuttered bitcoin exchange. The meeting provided those burned by the exchange their first face-to-face interaction with Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles, who gave a brief apology for the situation but otherwise left […]
In a speech published by Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani mentioned his company’s likely integration of bitcoin payments later this year. Speaking to a meeting of Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten Marketplace) e-commerce merchant partners, Mikitani said that the “internet revolution” was accelerating, and that Rakuten will “sooner or later” start accepting bitcoin. According […]
Japanese lawmakers announced yesterday that they would not be implementing regulations on bitcoin or other virtual currencies for the time being. The announcement from Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the ruling government party in the country’s Parliamentary system, won’t be official policy until additional hearings are completed. Speaking with Reuters, LDP lawmaker Takuya Hirai said: […]
Long before Mt.Gox revealed that lost hundreds of millions of dollars in customer funds due to bad coding, security issues and negligence, the Tokyo-based exchange was involved in another high-profile case with Seattle-based virtual-currency startup CoinLab. With a proposed plan to settle most of Mt.Gox’s bankruptcy debits working its way through the international legal system, […]