Cryptocurrencies suffer fall after South Korean exchange reports $32m coins stolen

Cryptocurrencies dropped after South Korean exchange Bithumb was hacked and $32m in coins were stolen, including Ripple tokens.

That sent Bitcoin prices down by 1.19% to $6,637 as of 1210 BST.

In order to forestall further damage, the trading venue, the seventh largest in the world, suspended crypto deposits and withdrawals and announced it would move investors' assets to a so-called "cold wallet", which was disconnected from the Internet.

The Seoul-based operator also moved quickly to reassure its investors, saying on Twitter that the stolen coins would be covered from Bithumb's own reserves.

Bitcoin dropped as much as 2% on the heels of the latest hack, with the rest of the big cryptos, including Ripple, Ethereum and Litecoin also registering large falls.

According to TechCrunch, some in the crypto community were pointing to an 'inside job' as the most likely perpetrators of the hack.

Wednesday's heist followed a report earlier in the same month that Bithumb had been hit by a 30bn won tax bill from Korean authorities. Yet without an independent audit or third-party report into the incident, it was hard to know exactly what had happened.

It also came close on the heels of the theft, in January, of nearly $500m from Japanese exchange Coincheck.

More recently, last week it was reported that hackers had made away with $40m-worth of digital tokens from another South Korean venue, called Conrail.

The spate of hacks was behind a growing impression that exchanges were ill-prepared to combat such digital attacks, triggering calls for stricter government regulations and a dramatic drop in the popularity of digital currencies - which in part was being reflected in their prices.