Gopax Halts Trading in Seoul and Shifts Assets to Cold Wallets

Gopax stopped letting its customers trade on Friday afternoon. The Seoul exchange halted deposits and standard withdrawals at 05:55 UTC, suspended trading 58 minutes after that, and cancelled every order still sitting unfilled. What set it off was an email threatening a hack, first reported by the Korean daily Kyunghyang Shinmun. Nobody has reported a break-in, and no customer money is known to have moved. Two days later the exchange has not said when any of it comes back.

What stopped, and when

The clock times come from the company's own notices. Gopax posted at 14:49 KST on 6 November that it was suspending some services, by Seoul Economic Daily's account. Deposits and standard withdrawals through the site and the app went down at 14:55 KST. Trading followed at 15:53 KST. Cointelegraph and crypto.news both carry those times in UTC and cite notices numbered 2607 and 2608; the Seoul paper gives no time for the trading halt at all. One route out stayed open. Requests filed through the support centre are still accepted, checked by hand and worked through in order, which the company says will take longer than usual.

Nobody has reported a break-in

A threat is all anyone has described. No account read for this piece names the sender, and none says how the message was spotted. A Gopax representative, unnamed, told Kyunghyang that no hacking or attempted theft had occurred at that point. Finance Magnates reported the firm as recording no asset losses. Seoul Economic Daily's Sunday follow-up adds something nothing else carries: an unnamed senior financial regulator, speaking that day, said Gopax is believed to have received about two threatening emails. One outlet, one unnamed official. It stands unverified.

All the assets, or most of the hot ones

The cold-storage move is where the accounts separate. Cointelegraph says Gopax plans to shift all of its crypto assets offline, and Seoul Economic Daily quotes the company to the same effect. Finance Magnates says it is moving most of what sits in internet-connected hot wallets. Those are not one claim, and no outlet reconciles them.

"To ensure the safe custody of user assets, we plan to transfer all virtual assets to cold wallets for storage," the company said in the notice as Seoul Economic Daily renders it.

That rendering carries a caveat the paper prints itself: its quotations are machine-translated from Korean and may not match the original. The Korean text was not read for this story.

The regulator was already in the room

Gopax held 80.54 per cent of user assets offline at the end of September, on Financial Supervisory Service data carried by Cointelegraph and crypto.news. The legal floor is 80 per cent. Cointelegraph calls the figure near the minimum and crypto.news calls it slightly above, which is one number read two ways; Seoul Economic Daily alone calls it the lowest among the country's five major exchanges, and attaches no date to it. Two emergency meetings also sit in the record, and neither outlet mentions the other's. crypto.news reports the Financial Services Commission convening exchanges on 2 November, after the hot-wallet theft at Binance on 29 October. Finance Magnates reports one on 28 October, following Bithumb's groupware intrusion. They may well be two meetings. We could not establish which.

What the shutdown costs is the figure nobody has published. Not one account read here gives Gopax a user count, a trading volume or a ranking by size, so how many people have been locked out since Friday afternoon is not on the record. There is an unresolved disclosure behind it too. Seven customers and two current or former staff had information exposed in a leak the company announced in October, which Finance Magnates dates to abnormal access starting in early September. Until a restart is named, a Gopax balance moves only through a support ticket and a manual check.