Livecoin, a lesser-known Russian cryptocurrency exchange, has abruptly halted operations in the aftermath of an alleged hacker attack on Christmas solar day. According to Livecoin'southward primary page, the commutation has suffered a "carefully planned assail" causing the platform to lose command of all of its servers, backend and nodes.

The substitution urged its customers to terminate using its services including deposits, trading and API. "We were non able to stop our service in time. Our news channels were compromised as well. At the moment, we partially control frontend, and and so we're able to place this proclamation," Livecoin'due south chief page reads.

Livecoin said that information technology's working hard to call up control of its servers, promising to provide a security update "in the next few days." The commutation as well claimed that it is cooperating with "local police regime."

According to some reports, the incident took place on the night between Dec. 23 and Dec. 24. Hackers have apparently managed to take over Livecoin'due south infrastructure and change the prices on the exchange to abnormally loftier values.

A co-founder of YellowBlock, a crypto educational website, known as "Cryptorangutang" said that Bitcoin (BTC) exceeded $320,000 per coin on the platform on Dec. 24. "Whatever is going on, I don't recommend trying to make $ on this, very likely you volition become your funds stuck," he wrote on Twitter.

According to comments of commutation users on Livecoin'southward unofficial Telegram group, the exchange is not operating at the time of publishing despite the exchange having briefly opened a login page. Some Reddit users besides suggested that Livecoin'southward "hack" could exist a classic exit scam.

Livecoin did non immediately reply to Cointelegraph'southward request for annotate. The exchange is obviously not actively running whatsoever official social media accounts on Twitter or Telegram.

At the time of publishing, Livecoin's trading volumes are not available on major crypto tracking websites like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap. As of Dec. 24, Livecoin was reportedly ranked 173 among crypto exchanges, with a daily trading volume of around $16 meg.