On February 16, users of the Zaif platform in Japan were able to acquire bitcoins for free for about 20 minutes due to an error in the system.
According to a statement released on Tuesday, the Japanese exchange office reported that last Friday there was an error in the system of calculating the price of transactions that affected the yen / bitcoin ratio, so several users bought bitcoin valued at 0 yen from 5:40 pm until 5:58 p.m. (local time).
The sum purchased by users amounted to a total of 2.2 billion yen in bitcoin, which is equivalent to 20 billion dollars, according to a local newspaper. The total of the transactions were awarded to seven users and a correction was applied to the balances as soon as the error was detected, at 7:35 p.m.
However, the team behind the exchange house had problems with one of these seven buyers, who tried to change the bitcoins they had acquired for free, a situation that had not been solved at the time of writing. There is no knowledge about how much money was left in the hands of this user.
According to the exchange house, the rest of the users was not affected since the error was corrected as soon as it was known. Zaif is an exchange house belonging to the Tech Bureau Corp. group and, along with another 16, is officially registered with the government of Japan to perform cryptocurrency operations in the Asian country. The authorities of the country do not rule out the possibility that the error could represent a vulnerability that can be exploited by hackers.
In January, a major Japanese exchange house, Coincheck, suffered what the founder of NEM called "the biggest theft in history", when it lost 530 million dollars, according to market prices at that time, after a hack As a result of this, the operations of the cryptoactive market suffered a setback, and later they migrated to other exchange houses, among them the Zaif platform. The failure of the latter system could affect the Japanese market if users begin to look with distrust at the rest of the country's exchange houses.
The Financial Services Agency of Japan will be responsible for lifting an investigation process against this exchange house. It will study the security of the system and Zaif's business practices. This agency, in the month of October of last year, was responsible for issuing a document in which it analyzed in detail the risks that would imply the investment in Initial Offers of Currency (ICO).![]
