GOPAX Trading Halt: Hack Threat Freezes Korean Exchange

The GOPAX trading halt is a precaution, not a hack. Bitcoin Magazine reports that the South Korean exchange stopped withdrawals and trading on Friday, November 6, after a hacking-threat email. Cointelegraph carries the same core facts.

What the GOPAX trading halt covers

GOPAX stopped standard deposits and withdrawals at 2:55 pm Korean time, then stopped trading at 3:53 pm. All open orders were cancelled. Web and app withdrawals are off. Customers can ask the support centre for a manual withdrawal, and GOPAX warns that verification may slow it down.

The trigger was an email from someone claiming they could hack the exchange. A GOPAX official told Yonhap the threat was not verified, per Bitcoin Magazine. Meanwhile, a representative told Kyunghyang Shinmun that no hack or attempted theft had happened, per Cointelegraph. No loss of customer assets has been reported.

GOPAX says it will move all held assets into cold wallets. Bitcoin Magazine quotes the exchange: “To ensure the safe custody of user assets, we plan to transfer all virtual assets to cold wallets for storage.” Neither outlet says the transfer is finished, and neither gives a reopening date. Cointelegraph says GOPAX had not replied to it by publication.

The numbers behind the GOPAX trading halt

Cointelegraph cites Financial Supervisory Service data showing GOPAX kept 80.54% of user assets offline at the end of September. Korean exchanges must hold at least 80%. So that is a thin cushion.

Bitcoin Magazine also notes that personal data leaked from some GOPAX accounts starting in early September, affecting seven customers and two current or former employees. GOPAX treats that as separate from the threat email. Any link is unconfirmed. The outlets also point to a recent run of exchange incidents, including the Binance loss we covered when the Fed and OCC checked US banks after the Binance hack.

Miner math: what an exchange freeze does to your margin

Here is the live maths on November 7. Bitcoin is $75,903 and the network is 1011 EH/s, so hashprice is about $34.05 per petahash per day. That is what one PH/s of hashing earns before power.

Numbers are profit per day after electricity, at the three power prices shown. Break-even is the most you can pay per kilowatt-hour before the machine loses money. Specs are the manufacturer ratings; network data comes from mempool.space. Try your own power price in our free bitcoin mining profit calculator. See what these machines really sold for in our used ASIC miner price index. Want to run the same numbers on a machine you can buy today? See our used ASIC miners, or buy several at once through bulk lots.

A small exchange freeze can still spook the tape, so test it: if bitcoin falls 3%: the break-even power price on an S19k Pro falls from 6.2 to 6.0 cents per kilowatt-hour. At 8 cents, daily profit goes from -$1.16 to -$1.28.

The blunt answer for miners

GOPAX does not change hashprice. Network hashrate is near 1011 EH/s per mempool.space, and the table above decides who makes money. Instead, the risk is where your coins sit. A miner whose payouts go to one exchange can be locked out on a bad Friday, while power bills still arrive.

We would send payouts to your own wallet, and keep a second exchange account for selling. If your machines lose money at your power price, see our we buy used miners page, or browse all miners. More margin maths is in our mining economics coverage.

-Nick
ING Mining

This is general information, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile, and exchanges can fail. Please do your own research.

How this story was made: drafted with the help of AI tools from public sources, then edited by Nick Squires. See our editorial policy. Spot an error? Email ns@ingmining.com.