GOPAX Halts Withdrawals and Trading After Hacking Threat
Withdrawals stopped at 2:55 p.m. local time and trading at 3:53 p.m. Assets are moving to cold wallets; no loss has been reported.
South Korean crypto exchange GOPAX suspended withdrawals at 2:55 p.m. local time Friday and halted trading at about 3:53 p.m. after receiving an email that claimed the platform had been hacked, the exchange said.
No asset loss has been reported. GOPAX said it had not verified whether the threat was genuine and was moving assets from hot wallets into offline cold storage as a precaution, Yonhap News Agency reported. The Korea Herald carried the same account.
What a hot-to-cold shift does
A hot wallet stays online so the exchange can process customer sends quickly. A cold wallet is kept offline, cut off from the internet, which shrinks the surface an attacker can reach if they have access to online systems. GOPAX said it is transferring remaining hot-wallet balances into cold storage first, then checking security. Standard withdrawals through the website and app are off. Customers who want coins out must apply through the customer support center, where requests are handled manually after internal checks. All open orders were canceled when trading stopped. Deposits of virtual assets were also paused. The company has not set a date to reopen services.
A GOPAX official told Yonhap the email came from a group claiming to have hacked the exchange. "We are prioritizing the protection of customers' assets, even if this causes inconvenience to users," the official said.
The move lands as South Korea's financial sector digests a wider cybersecurity wave. The Financial Services Commission earlier confirmed incidents at 37 financial institutions that affected about 470,000 customer records, Yonhap said. Separately, Korean coverage has noted earlier personal-information leaks at GOPAX this fall; a link between those leaks and Friday's email has not been confirmed.
In our opinion: customers face stalled access while GOPAX verifies the email and finishes the cold-wallet move. No loss is reported. The next checkable item is the date the exchange restores standard withdrawals and trading; until then, manual support-desk requests are the only path out.
Sources: Yonhap News Agency · The Korea Herald · Bitcoin Magazine
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