Gatecoin has recently announced its plans to reopen all activity on Wednesday, August 17th and it will do so without any trading fees September 1st, 2016, in what seems to be an effort to draw clients back to the Hong Kong-based exchange.
Gatecoin was hacked on the May 13th through a security breach which was linked to a disruption of service caused by a server reboot. 250 BTC and 185,000 ETH (over 15% of all crypto assets deposited on Gatecoin) were stolen during this hacked. The exchange committed to restoring all balances to users and has been working towards that goal ever since.
Once the exchange reopens during this month, all affected users will be able to withdraw 10% of the Ether held during the hack, as the remaining 90% are currently being referred to as Ethereum Debt (ETD) and will also be listed in the client’s balances but will be locked until Gatecoin reaches ETH liquidity to repay all of the affected users.
Gatecoin has received a $500,000 investment from a Japanese firm and continues to gather fees from processing several OTC block trades in an effort to repay all the stolen funds to the compromised accounts. Users with more than 10ETH at the time of the hack will also receive a free Ledger Wallet. Gatecoin’s announcement stated:
Re-launching the exchange before September was a condition of our first post-hack investment, which is why we are going ahead with other solutions to manage the ETH debt repayment to affected clients. We hope that resumption of trading services will also encourage other prospective investors to confirm their commitment.
Come September, new assets like Augur (REP), the Ethereum based prediction market token, and Digix Gold Tokens (DGX) which are backed by gold and also built on Ethereum, will be added to the exchange, as well as a new fiat pair, CNY. Gatecoin will also support Ethereum Classic, as most exchanges have done so far, with the exception of BTC-e and Coinbase, that will soon allow ETC balances but will not add storage or trading features for it.
Following Gatecoin’s new CTO and team of engineers will work on security, which will be restructured starting with new security procedures that will be implemented at re-launch (August 17th)
This latest announcement by Gatecoin comes at much needed a time, when confidence in cryptocurrencies seems to be shrinking daily as new security exploits continue to surge in the cryptocurrency world, such as the ones found on The DAO, Steemit, and Bitfinex.
It is very important to note that this kind of security and function failures are expected to occur with such innovative and young technology such as cryptocurrencies, which are currently in their infancy.
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