Italian cryptocurrency exchange Altsbit, which was hacked earlier this month, has announced that it will close its operations after completing a partial refund of affected clients’ funds.

Altsbit publishes a partial plan:

According to show On its website, Altsbit says that its cryptocurrency exchange will end operations in May 2020.

This announcement comes after the platform was hacked on Wednesday, February 5, 2020, and the following is an excerpt from the platform’s statement:

After careful analysis we were able to understand the stolen amounts, fortunately a large part of the cryptocurrency was kept in cold storage, and these cryptocurrencies will be returned to users of the Altsbit platform because there is no possibility to compensate for these losses, and they will be distributed among all users of the platform, each coin will be counted Based on the percentages saved during the attack.

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Due to insufficient cold storage space in the platform to compensate for the full extent of penetration.

Altsbit says that partial redemption on February 10, 2020, will run until May 8, 2020.

Altsbit also provided an updated account of the file encryption stolen by the hackers, which includes Bitcoin and Ethereum worth $63,000.

The attack also saw the platform lose coins such as Komodo (KMD) and (ARRR).

According to Altsbit, 53% of the stolen Bitcoin and 28% of the stolen Ethereum will be recovered.

Small-sized cryptocurrency exchanges face the possibility of extinction:

Cryptocurrency-related cybercrime and tighter government regulatory policies are negatively impacting the ability of small-scale exchanges to maintain their operations.

“Altsbit” is not the first crypto trading platform to be affected by a malicious cyber breach that killed its trading operations.

The New Zealand-based platform Cryptopia is one of the prominent examples of being liquidated in 2019 after it was also hacked.

A report from Chainalysis showed that crypto hacks increased in 2019, but the total number of stolen tokens decreased, likely due to improved security measures.

These robust defense protocols mean the cost of exchanges increases, some of which lack the trading volume to secure sufficient revenue to finance these expenditures.

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Financial regulators are also enacting stricter laws which in turn increase the cost of compliance for crypto exchanges.

Smaller sized platforms may not have the capacity to handle this increased OPEX.

The creation of updated EU Anti-Money Laundering Laws (AMLD5) may accelerate the disappearance of smaller crypto firms from the market.

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