Gatecoin exchange set to relaunch in two weeks
After being hacked and taken offline for three months now, the bitcoin and digital currency exchange Gatecoin is set to relaunch in two weeks, on August 17, 2016.
In May, Gatecoin was hacked where the total amount of funds that were stolen from the exchange’s hot wallets was equivalent of $2 million USD at the time; 250 BTC were stolen and 185,000 ETH was stolen.
Last month, the exchange said they raised an equity investment of $500,000 USD from a listed Japanese investment company which will help them relaunch. The name of the investment company was not disclosed.
With the latest update, things are beginning to look more promising for the exchange and former exchange users. Gatecoin now says the trading platform will be relaunched on Wednesday, August 17th, 08:00 GMT with zero trading fees until September 1, 2016.
As part of the relaunch plan, Gatecoin will also be supporting CNY (Mainland China only), DGX (gold-backed Ethereum tokens), ETC (Ethereum Classic) and enabling REP transfers to coincide with the full release of Augur — a decentralized prediction market built on Ethereum, of which REP is the token. Gatecoin is also giving away free Ledger Wallets for clients with balances of 10 ETH or more.
Gatecoin has revamped their security since the hack, including hiring a new technology officer and new engineers, which the exchange says that half of the new engineering team will now be focused on security and systems administration and the other half focused on enhancing the technology behind the trading platform.
The new security changes listed for the exchange are:
- All servers have been migrated to a new, more secure, server hosting provider.
- A higher proportion of servers are high-security, auto-updating Linux servers.
- Extra firewall layers have been added at the server provider level to supplement the firewalls in place on top of each individual server for enhanced protection.
- Round-the-clock security monitoring with constant penetration testing.
- Re-design of intermediary multi-signature wallet systems for all cryptocurrencies and blockchain assets.
- Prohibition of the use of generic logins for improved auditing of our systems.
- Additional segregated application layers within the system architecture to avoid escalation in case of intrusion.
According to Gatecoin, the hacking investigation is still ongoing, so the details are still a bit vague in that area. The exchange is working closely with the Hong Kong Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau on the criminal investigation into the system breach.
