The mastodon Bithumb victim of a hack last June of $ 17 million sees its revenues approaching close to US$ 300 million with an operating margin of US$ 194 million for the first six months of this year.
A hectic Q1
We remember, of course, the terrible month of June that some Korean exchanges experienced. Let’s note though the security tests passed not without evil tens of millions of dollars evaporated on Coinrail early June, and in the wake of the hack of the platform in question Bithumb, estimated in the first place to US$ 30 million and then revised down a few days later.
Korean platforms seem to be on the alert lately … But whoever says that does not say not-lucrative. Indeed, the information does not appear to come from the Bithumb platform itself, but rather from Vidente (also known as ‘Seven Star Works’), a company primarily focused on the manufacture and marketing of high definition video equipment with almost 11% of Bithumb’s share capital.
Vidente announced the news to the local media Yonhap. According to her, before any deductions, Bithumb generated a total of US$ 270 million in revenue in the first six months of 2018 and achieved an operating margin in the order of US$ 194 million. The data is not available to the general public Korean media reports that late last year, the annual net profit of the platform was equal to 10 times the amount generated during this semester! The road still seems long!
Long and winding
Although Bithumb had reported that it had been able to recover US$ 14 million from last June’s hack, the setbacks of the exchange do not stop there. Indeed, it has not yet been demonstrated whether or not the few million remaining volatilized during cyber-attacks were taken into account during the accounting entries. Add to that the substantial bill received by the platform at the beginning of the year for lack of tax evasion: it is some $ 28 million that will likely be written in the column ‘Provision’. To date, nothing has been found yet.
A quick visit to the CoinMarketCap website will tell us that the volume of 24H transactions in the Korean exchange has fallen sharply, which was previously recognized as the largest crypto exchange in the world.
As an indication, in early 2018, US$ 2.4 billion was traded on this platform making it the third largest volume exchange in the world. Not less than eight months later it’s almost 40 times less (US$ 71.7 million) making it switch to 19th place!
CoinDesk, for its part, announced in early August that the exchange’s daily trading volume had dropped 40 percent from $ 350 million to $ 250 million in one week. The reason for this would come from the suspension of opening new bank accounts due to numerous restrictions.
Yonhap News, Reuters,CoinMarketCap, The News Asia, Coindesk
