The clinking sound you heard was someone making off with the cryptocurrency. CoinDash, the startup focused on blockchain, reported Bloomberg News, has been the victim of a hack and a heist.
The company disclosed Monday that during the data breach, $7 million was stolen, in total, from investors that had been trying to get in on what is known as an initial coin offering (ICO). In terms of the hack, investors had paid for the coin with Ethereum and had been told by CoinDash to send the funds to that firm’s smart contact address. Yet the address was changed to a new one by hackers, and funds were siphoned off.
Bloomberg reported that, to date, the identity of the hackers remains unknown, and the coin sale has been abandoned, with CoinDash stating that no more of the cryptocurrency should be sent to the site that had been advertised.
As noted by the newswire, cryptocurrencies and the upswing in prices, as with bitcoin, have spurred investor enthusiasm to boost prices even further. Consider Ethereum itself, which is the network that has seen some from $8 to $300 to a recent $174. The coin sale itself was on tap to last 28 days, with a $12 million limit in place. But with cryptocurrencies —really any form of digital payments — come a certain amount of risk.
In a statement, the company said the data breach and resulting fraud “was a damaging event to both our contributors and our company, but it is surely not the end of our project.”
The company also said that those who’d sent funds to the addresses (both the real and fraudulent ones) during the initial coin offering (ICO) will get the CoinDash tokens they’d intended to buy.
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