The notorious cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck has acquired 100% share of Metaps Alpha, a blockchain-focused NFT developer, Monex Group, the operator of Coincheck exchange, announced in a press release.
Subscribe to our Telegram channel to stay up to date on the latest crypto and blockchain news.
With the acquisition, Coincheck will get control over an on-chain NFT marketplace called miime.io, which was launched back in September 2019. The acquisition is part of Coincheck's commitment to begin providing in fiscal year 2020 a marketplace for trading NFTs.
The exchange emphasizes the current expansion of the NFT marketplace "has exposed scalability problems" due to high transactional fees on the Ethereum blockchain.
"To circumvent these issues as well as make NFT transactions easier, Coincheck is working on the development of an off-chain NFT marketplace that does not have a gas fee," Monex wrote.
Coincheck will create both an off-chain and on-chain NFT marketplace to develop the industry more quickly in Japan and overseas. According to the press release, miime.io will continue to be offered, however, under a different brand name.
In August 2020, the Tokyo District Court ordered the conditional seizure of some $46,000 worth of bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin) and the XEM token that had been tied to the Coincheck hack of 2018. The court issued a protective order on the funds after the police seized the tokens from a 30-year-old doctor from Obihiro in Hokkaido.
The Coincheck hack remains to be one of the biggest attacks on the cryptocurrency exchanges that resulted in a loss of $400 million worth of NEO cryptocurrency.
Access more than 50 of the world's financial markets directly from your EXANTE account – including NASDAQ, London Stock Exchange and Tokyo Stock Exchange.