A hack in South Korea may have helped wipe out $50 billion from the cryptocurrency market over the weekend.
On Sunday, the price of Bitcoin took a dive after South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail reported a breach involving 30 percent of the digital coin it had in storage.
Coinrail is still determining how much was stolen, but the attackers may have looted as much as $40 million, according to observers who point to a digital wallet that appears to be involved in the hack. According to that wallet, the anonymous hackers stole huge amounts of tokens from several more obscure digital currencies, in addition to pilfering some Ether.
Although Coinrail itself is a relative minor exchange, news of the breach appeared to exacerbate a sell-off of cryptocurrencies that was already underway by Saturday. The price of Bitcoin, for instance, fell from $7,220 to $6,732 in a mere two hours after the South Korean exchange reported the hack.
All together, the cryptocurrency market lost about $40 billion to $50 billion over the weekend, according to Coinmarketcap.com, at a time when the virtual assets are struggling to hold value.
Coinrail is now offline. The company is currently investigating the breach and trying to freeze the stolen funds. To prevent further hacking, the exchange has also moved the remaining 70 percent of its digital assets offline to a "cold wallet."
The breach occurs as North Korean hackers have been blamed for attempting to steal digital currencies from several exchanges across the world. In January, a Japanese exchanged called Coincheck lost over $500 million in an intrusion that some suspect North Korean hackers had a hand in.