NEM Price Boosts as Recently Hacked Coincheck Re-enables Trading | Crypto
The price of NEM tokens (XEM) jumped to a peak 25 percent after Japanese exchange Coincheck announced that it would once again allow trading of the token, which was suspended after a hack at the exchange led to a more than half-billion dollars in tokens being stolen and systematically laundered through other exchanges. During the last 24 hours, NEM price has gained 17 percent making it the best performing cryptocurrency in the top 20 by market cap.
NEM said on Twitter:
“Coin Check Co., Ltd. resumed new account opening and payment / purchase of some virtual currencies on October 30, 2018, With regard to ETH, XEM and LSK, technical safety confirmation has been completed with the cooperation of external experts and we have resumed payment / purchase of the virtual currency from November 12, 2018 I will inform you that.”
Just for reminder, the hack took place in January this year, when all the cryptocurrencies were still on the bright side of the market. Almost 6% of the circulating tokens were compromised to the hack. This became known as the biggest hack to take place in the cryptocurrency market after Mt. Gox. According to reports, the tokens were converted on the darknet and were either encashed or converted to other cryptocurrencies.
When the unfamous hack happened, the NEM team helped the exchange as they had the mechanism to track the wallets which had the stolen funds. However, this came to an end as the hackers started to send some of the stolen funds to ‘innocent wallets’, resulting in the team tracking their wallets as well.
The exchange also didn’t have a license by the Financial Services Authority to conduct operations related to cryptocurrencies at the time of the hack. Nevertheless, Coincheck had agreed to distibute $440 million to over 260,000 users, who were affected by the hack.
In April, Japanese online brokerage firm Monex Group announced its decision to acquire 100% shares of Coincheck for more than 3.6 billion yen (around $34 million). The company said then that they believe that blockchain technology is likely to change the future.
“We recognize blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as next-generation technologies and platforms which are likely to drastically change the way people approach money. Therefore, since we announced “MONEX’s new beginning” last October, we have considered entering the cryptocurrency exchange business and set up the Monex Cryptocurrency Lab to grow our business based on these new technologies.”
After that, in August, the Ukrainian Central Election Commission said that they are seriously examining the possibilities of NEM’s blockchain, which, they believe, could potentially facilitate and improve the procedure of local and national elections.
The head of the state register of voters Oleksandr Stelmakh then said that the experiment had been organized with the usage of NEM blockchain modules. However, the trials and testing procedures are still in progress.
NEM is 17th on the current list of tokens by market capitalization. It hit a high of $0.114 overnight, but currently sits about .007 less than that, being worth $0.107375, marking a 16 percent gain. Considering how NEM is incredibly popular in Japan, this news alone seems more than sufficient to get people excited about this altcoin once again. It is also an important step toward ensuring Coincheck users can trade in a safe and secure manner.
The New Economy Movement (NEM, for short) is a smart contract-ready platform for dApp development, similar to Ethereum. Founded in 2015, the platform uses its own consensus algorithm known as Proof-of-Importance, which weights a node’s influence based on network activity, as well as their wallet balance. This means active nodes can sometimes have more network authority than their richer, passive counterparts.
Market reactions like these usually occur whenever Coinbase announces a new listing. The same thing happened for other fiat-crypto exchanges. Tron’s (TRX) market cap went up by more than a billion dollars after it was listed on Bithumb in early April.
Coincheck’s new owners, the Japanese financial services conglomerate, Monex Group, will be probably wanting to put the exchange’s past firmly behind them. By relisting NEM, Coincheck shows its will to finally close the chapter on what must have been a trying ten months.