GOPAX Halts Trading and Withdrawals to Move All Assets to Cold Storage

South Korea's GOPAX suspended trading, deposits and standard withdrawals on Friday after receiving an email threatening a hack, the newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun reported. No actual breach had taken place at that point, a GOPAX representative told the paper.

The exchange moved in two steps. It halted deposits and standard withdrawals at 5:55 a.m. UTC, then stopped trading at 6:53 UTC in a second announcement. All unfilled orders were canceled. GOPAX said it plans to transfer all crypto assets to offline wallets to protect users, citing a series of leaks and hacking incidents affecting financial institutions and pointing to recommendations from financial regulators. Cointelegraph reached out to the exchange for comment but had received no response by publication time.

Customers are not fully locked out. Withdrawals remain available through GOPAX's support center, though the exchange warned that manual verification and approvals could delay processing — an operational trade-off between speed and security that users will feel directly until normal service resumes.

What does this change for GOPAX users?

In the short term, slower access to funds and canceled open orders. In the longer term, a stronger security posture: moving everything to cold storage puts the exchange well above the 80% offline threshold that South Korean law imposes. Financial Supervisory Service data showed GOPAX held 80.54% of user assets offline at the end of September — barely above the required minimum. The forced migration closes that gap.

The timing is not accidental. The suspension came days after South Korea's Financial Services Commission urged domestic exchanges to increase cold-wallet holdings following the $6.3 billion Binance hack. Under South Korean rules, exchanges must keep at least 80% of customer crypto assets in cold storage.

A regulator already circling the sector

The FSC has been tightening its grip. In October, it reported cybersecurity deficiencies at 130 of 555 financial companies reviewed nationwide. The regulator also identified GOPAX operator Streami and fellow crypto exchange Prabang among 16 companies involved in earlier security incidents, and it has signaled plans for tighter cybersecurity oversight as a result.

Prabang's case shows what that pressure looks like in practice. The exchange suspended services on Oct. 24 after detecting abnormal withdrawals from its hot wallet, losing about 100 million won ($70,000), according to Yonhap News Agency. Prabang said it would reimburse affected customers using company funds.

For GOPAX, the preemptive shutdown is a defensive bet that a few days of frozen trading is cheaper than a hot-wallet incident. It also signals how quickly Korean exchanges now treat regulator recommendations as near-mandatory, especially with two of the country's trading platforms already named in an FSC security review.

The practical question now is how fast GOPAX completes the cold-storage migration and restores automated withdrawals — and whether the FSC turns its planned oversight into formal, enforceable cybersecurity rules for the sector.