South Korea suspects that a trading platform that recently declared bankruptcy may be the victim of North Korea's "gold fishing" through digital currency. The Wall Street Journal quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that South Korean investigators led by South Korean law enforcement agencies and national cyber security agencies are investigating whether digital currency's trading platform Youbit filed for bankruptcy this week may be related to North Korea.

Insiders said that the investigation is still in its infancy and it may take several weeks to evaluate malicious code. However, there are signs that North Korea has launched more and more financial wars in recent years, which may be behind the hacking of Youbit.

In fact, with the increasing international sanctions facing North Korea, the transaction price of digital currency, led by Bitcoin, has soared in recent years, and there are reports that North Korean hackers attacked the digital currency platform.

Reuters reported last week that Korea Internet Promotion Agency (Korea Internet &; A researcher of the security agency said that North Korea had previously attacked a number of South Korean digital currency platforms, and the value of the stolen digital currency was currently about 90 billion won, or about 82 million US dollars.

Yonhap News Agency reported on Monday that a spokesman for South Korea's Unification Ministry said on the same day that North Korea was carrying out various activities to earn foreign exchange to avoid sanctions, and South Korea was paying attention to North Korea's bitcoin-related trends.

Wall Street has previously mentioned that South Korea has become one of the most active and largest bitcoin trading markets in the world. Some analysts estimate that about 265,438+0% of global bitcoin transactions take place in South Korea.

On Tuesday, Youbit announced that it had been hacked for the second time this year, causing serious losses equivalent to 17% of its total assets. Youbit did not specify the specific amount of loss, but said that customers may only get back 75% of the value of virtual currency assets.

In April this year, Youbit lost 4,000 bitcoins due to hacking, which was worth about $73 million according to Tuesday's market value.

Bitstamp platform shows that the spot transaction price of Bitcoin was less than 1 0,000 dollars at the beginning of this year, and once rose above10.96 million dollars last week, approaching the $20,000 mark.

However, after Youbit declared bankruptcy on Tuesday, Bitcoin fell sharply that day. After the US Securities and Futures Commission suspended the stock trading of a digital currency-based company, Bitcoin fell by nearly 1 000 USD in an hour, and once fell by 10% in the day, setting the biggest decline since the eve of the listing of Bitcoin futures.