Bithumb Trading Volume Drops 40% After Bank Freeze

Trading volume in one of the most important cryptocurrency exchanges in the world has dropped 40% after three days since its temporarily stopped accepting new users.

In order to understand what happened, we need to know that the South Korean exchange Bithumb, experienced an important hack of over $31 million dollars in June. This is very important because the virtual currency market has suffered from this attack and it is trying to avoid them.

Regulators all over the world are trying to impose new rules to make the crypto ecosystem a more secure space for investors and financial institutions.

Now that we have explained this situation, on July the 31st, the exchange wrote in a blog post that it was going to suspend opening accounts for new customers starting on August the 1st.

The exchange did not provide any other reason about the suspension, but according to Business Korea, the exchange was forced to suspend new account creation because its banking partner, NH Nonghyup Bank, did not renew Bithumb’s contract after the attack suffered.

This has already affected the exchange, known as one of the ‘big four’ in South Korea. The 24 hour trading volume on the platform was over $350 million dollars on Tuesday, as CoinMarketCap shows. But now, the trading volume of the exchange seems to be $166 million dollars.

New accounts are now suspended, but Bithumb explained that those users that have identity-linked virtual accounts will be able to use the platform for deposit and withdrawal services.

However, Bithumb stated that it has a ‘consensus’ with Nonghyup Bank to renew the contract and is working so as to ‘iron out our different views ons ome legal expressions and start issuing virtual accounts soon.’

Another negative thing to mention about the exchange is that deposits and withdrawals in 10 different cryptocurrencies will be enabled the next Saturday. The currencies affected include Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and XRP. Bithumb explained that they have performed different security checks and improvements after the hack on the platform.

South Korea has been working in order to create a more regulated market for virtual currencies, exchanges and other crypto-related companies. Indeed, users in the platform need to use real-name virtual accounts since the beginning of the year. This has been implemented in an attempt to reduce the cases of money laundering and terrorism financing.

Back on July the 26th, an important executive at the Financial Services Commission (FSC) asked politicians to start regulating cryptocurrency exchanges ‘as soon as possible.’

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