Another year is drawing to a close and is, as always, time to take stock; 2019 started on the wave of optimism for cryptocurrencies, with a bull run that brought the bitcoin price back above 10 thousand dollars after the fund reached at the end of what was in effect one of the hardest years for the crypto market, 2018, with BTC reaching a low of just under 3 thousand dollars. While 2019 has been a positive year for bitcoins, the same cannot be said for the altcoins, which have suffered significant losses compared to the maximums reached in 2017. Even worse, however, as regards safety, 2019 was one of the darkest years for trading platforms, comparable only to the collapse of Mt.Gox; to compile a ranking of the hacking suffered by the exchanges was, today, CoinDesk, which however has limited itself to census only the seven most serious cases, in reality the theft suffered by the exchange platforms during this year are many more and, moreover, the leaks of users' private data do not appear in the CoinDesk ranking. As reconstructed by the well-known information site, therefore, 2019 opened with the failure of cryptopia that occurred following the violations that in mid-January caused huge losses for the exchange, estimated at around 16 million dollars; despite the efforts made by the platform to continue its activity, the New Zealand exchange is inevitably capitulated by filing for bankruptcy in the following March.

Also in March dates the hack suffered by DragonEx, a platform based in Singapore, which suffered a theft amounting to 7 million dollars, while the theft suffered by Bithumb, still in March due to the abduction of 13mln of EOS token plus 6m of XRP. Bithumb had already been targeted by hackers the previous year, but in 2018 the theft had been larger, in fact, 31 million dollars had been stolen from the platform, but this time the funds of the platform were targeted. not those of users who, for once, have therefore lost nothing. The record for the largest amount stolen during 2019 seemed to be up to Binance, the exchange was in fact stolen as much as 7 thousand bitcoins (equal to about 40 million dollars) during a hacking that revealed a serious vulnerability of one of the his hot wallets; fortunately, the exchange has the habit of setting aside a share of its profits precisely to deal with this type of risk, so the users involved in the theft have seen their funds repaid and the binance has taken on the losses. The robbery suffered in June by BiTrue seemed to be more modest, having seen it subtract $ 4.2m in XRP and ADA tokens, but following a subsequent review it was learned that the theft amounted to $ 11.5m overall more than twice as much as initially estimated; the following month, in July, it was the Japanese BitPoint exchange that lost the beauty of 28 million dollars taken from the accounts of 50 thousand users who, fortunately, were reimbursed by Remixpoint (the company that controls the exchange). We then arrive at the last attack in order of time from the exchanges, this time it was UpBit's turn that blows the first position on the podium in a binance, with a steal of 49 million dollars immediately, just two days ago; 342 thousand ETH, in fact, flew away in a few minutes, to be affected were the wallets of the exchange and not those in which the users' funds are kept.