South Korean Crypto Exchange Gopax Suspends Withdrawals and Trading After Hacking Threat

South Korea's Gopax halted standard withdrawals at 2:55 p.m. and trading at 3:53 p.m. Friday after a hacking-threat email, and is transferring all held assets to cold wallets with no loss reported so far.

South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Gopax suspended withdrawals and trading on Friday after receiving a hacking-threat email, and said it is moving all held virtual assets into offline cold wallets as a preemptive step to protect customer funds.

Gopax halted standard deposit and withdrawal services at 2:55 p.m. local time and stopped trading at 3:53 p.m., Yonhap News Agency reported , citing the exchange. Direct withdrawals through the website and app are unavailable. Customers who want coins out must apply through the customer support center, where requests are processed manually after internal verification.

“To ensure the safe custody of user assets, we plan to transfer all virtual assets to cold wallets for storage,” Gopax said in remarks carried by Seoul Economic Daily. “Direct withdrawals through the Gopax website or app are temporarily unavailable, and customers wishing to withdraw funds should apply through the Gopax customer support center.”

No actual loss of assets has been reported. The company has not set a date to reopen trading or standard withdrawals.

With trading offline, all open orders were canceled, Chosun Biz reported . Deposits were initially paused with withdrawals; later Korean coverage said deposits had been restored while web and app withdrawals stayed shut. Manual withdrawals through support will take longer than usual.

A cold wallet is a storage setup kept offline, cut off from the internet that hot wallets use to process customer sends. Gopax said the shift of remaining hot-wallet balances into cold storage is meant to shrink the surface available to anyone who can reach online systems.

A Gopax official told Yonhap the email came from a party claiming it could hack the exchange, but that the threat itself had not been verified. “We ask for your understanding, as this measure is intended to prevent financial incidents and protect user assets,” the company said .

The freeze lands in a week when exchange security is already under a bright light. On Oct. 29, attackers drained about $6.34 billion from Binance hot wallets in what Binance later described as a months-long campaign that began with a fake job interview. The FBI has tied that theft to North Korea; Binance has reopened withdrawals in stages and said it is covering customer losses from its own funds.

Brazil’s Mercado Bitcoin froze deposits and withdrawals earlier this week after its own security incident, with preliminary estimates of suspicious transfers near $40 million. Gopax’s case is different on the facts disclosed so far: the exchange is describing a threat email and a precautionary lockdown, not a confirmed drain.