The short version
- Gopax exchange paused crypto withdrawals at 05:55 UTC on Friday and all trading an hour later, after a group claiming to be hackers sent a threat email.
- No loss has been found. Gopax is moving every coin into cold wallets, so withdrawals now go through support by email and are approved by hand.
- It follows Korea’s call for more cold storage after the $6.4 billion Binance hack, and Binance owns 67.45% of the company that runs Gopax.
South Korea’s Gopax exchange stopped crypto withdrawals on Friday, then shut trading an hour later, after a group claiming to be hackers threatened to break in. One email did it.
Nothing has been stolen so far. Gopax is moving every coin it holds into cold storage, and nobody can say when the buttons come back.
The news hit X just after 10:00 UTC:
JUST IN: 🇰🇷 South Korean crypto exchange Gopax halts withdrawals following hacking threat.
What Did the Gopax Exchange Shut Down?
Withdrawals first, then trading. Gopax’s first notice paused crypto deposits and normal withdrawals from 05:55 UTC (2:55 p.m. in Seoul). A second notice halted all crypto trading from 06:53 UTC and cancelled every open order.
Here is what customers can and can’t do right now:
- Trading: paused, open orders cancelled.
- Withdrawals: not from the app or website. Requests go by email to the support desk and are checked and approved by hand, one by one, so they will take longer.
- Deposits: paused in the first notice. Korean press reported deposits working again by the evening; check the app before sending anything.
- Restart: no date. Gopax says it will post a new notice once the setup is safe.
The notices don’t mention the threat at all. They talk about “recent information leaks and hacking incidents at financial companies” and say Gopax is acting on the financial regulators’ recommendation. A Gopax official told Herald Business the exchange had received one threat email from a group calling itself hackers, and that it had not confirmed the email was real. “There was no hacking attempt,” another official told News1, but the exchange put customer assets ahead of business.
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Why Is Gopax Moving Everything to Cold Storage?
Because the regulators just asked every Korean exchange to. On November 2, the Financial Services Commission called in the exchanges after Binance lost about $6.4 billion from its hot wallets, the biggest crypto theft on record.
The message was blunt: keep more coins offline, watch transfers around the clock, add staff and set aside more reserves.
Binance’s own early findings on its hack, posted on October 30:
Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private
Korean law already says at least 80% of customer crypto has to sit in cold wallets. The gap between exchanges is wide, though. At the end of September, Upbit kept more than 99% offline, Bithumb about 94% and Coinone about 85%. Gopax sat just above the 80% floor.
That makes the move to 100% cold storage the strongest answer to a threat. A hacker can’t drain a hot wallet that holds nothing. The cost is speed: Gopax withdrawals now need a person to sign each one off.
There is one more twist. Binance has owned 67.45% of Streami, the company that runs Gopax, since its takeover was cleared by Korea’s financial watchdog in October 2025. So the exchange emptying its hot wallets is part of the same group whose hot wallets were hit a week ago.
SIDE TRAIL: Binance Hack: $6.3B Drained in the Biggest Crypto Theft Ever, Withdrawals Paused
A Rough Few Weeks for Gopax
This is not the exchange’s first scare this autumn. On October 16, Gopax said personal data of seven customers and two current or former staff had leaked. Someone had been getting into a few customer accounts since early September and looking up nicknames and login history.
And on Thursday, its own notice board shows deposits and withdrawals of some coins were delayed for about 11 hours because of an outage at Chainalysis, the blockchain analytics firm that is itself dealing with a breach.
The Gopax exchange is small. Its 24-hour trading volume was about 5.2 BTC on CoinGecko, a rounding error next to Upbit. The wider market barely noticed: Bitcoin trades at $75,522 at the time of writing, down 4.9% on the day for reasons that have more to do with Wall Street than Seoul.
For Gopax customers the only thing that matters is the restart date, and there isn’t one. The exchange will post a new notice, an official said, “once the situation is safe.”
TRAIL MAP: Your First Crypto Wallet, Set Up Safely: Hot vs Cold and the Seed Phrase
Satoshi Flipper has more than 20 years of trading experience, starting in stocks before moving into crypto in 2017, and holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. The edge is reading the economic data: rate decisions, inflation, jobs numbers, earnings and the US markets that move Bitcoin.
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