After suspending trading on May 14th, 2016, following the discovery of a system breach, which resulted in the loss of ETH 185,000 and BTC 250, Hong Kong-based Gatecoin will be re-launching its cryptocurrency and blockchain assets trading platform on Wednesday, August 17th, 2016 at 08:00 GMT. It will also enable partial withdrawals of ETH following hack.

On this re-launch date, the company said that clients will be able to trade and transfer BTC, DGD, DAO (withdrawals only), REP (trading only), EUR, USD, and HKD with no trading fees until September 1st, 2016.

New assets to be listed in September

From mid-September, Gatecoin will also be supporting CNY (Mainland China only), DGX (gold-backed Ethereum tokens), ETC (Ethereum Classic) and enabling REP transfers to coincide with the full release of Augur – a decentralized prediction market built on Ethereum, of which REP is the token.

Partial withdrawal of ETH funds will become available

Upon re-launch on August 17th, all Gatecoin ETH holders affected by the hack will be eligible to withdraw 10% of their funds in ETH (and soon ETC). The remaining 90% of ETH will be listed as ETD (ETH debt) on client balances, which will be locked until the exchange has the ETH liquidity to enable full reconciliation of ETD for ETH. This 10% was calculated based on the ETH that it had prior to the hack and the ETH 24,434 it currently has available for transfers, with a small buffer to allow for any transaction errors.

Support for Ethereum Classic

Gatecoin said that it is delighted to see the enthusiasm for Ethereum Classic among the community and other exchanges.

“We are proud to announce our support for ETC which will eventually be available for trading and transfers on Gatecoin in addition to ETH”, it said.

Free Ledger Wallets for clients with balances above ETH 10

Gatecoin clients with balances above ETH 10 before the hack are eligible to request a free Ledger Wallet (hardware wallet) until the end of September 2016, which will be sent by post to their home address. All requests should be sent to [email protected] with the subject: "Ledger Wallet Request."

Progress on ETH debt repayment methods

The Gatecoin team said that it continues to progress, albeit slower than expected, on several fundraising and ETH debt repayment channels. Following its first initial post-hack investment of USD 500K from a Japanese investment firm, it has received several offers of interest from parties in Greater China.

“Due diligence and negotiations continue with each of these parties and hopefully, we’ll have some positive developments to announce soon. Meanwhile, we are continuing to earn fees from the processing of several OTC block trades, which combined with further investment should enable us to reach our goal of ETH debt reconciliation”, Gatecoin added.

New security team structure

New CTO will join Gatecoin full-time from September 1st, 2016. While the company did not reveal the name, it said that he has been advising on the re-design of the platform’s security system prior to the re-launch over the last two months.

“He [CTO] brings more than 13 years’ experience as a systems engineer and is a member of the .NET Foundation. He will be joined by additional front-end and back-end engineers with extensive experience working in secured environments. Half of our engineering team will now be focused on security and systems administration and the other half focused on enhancing the technology behind the trading platform”, Gatecoin said.

New security procedures for the platform re-launch

• All servers have been migrated to a new, more secure, server hosting provider.
   
• A higher proportion of servers are high-security, auto-updating Linux servers.
   
• Extra firewall layers have been added at the server provider level to supplement the firewalls in place on top of each individual server for enhanced protection. 
   
• Round-the-clock security monitoring with constant penetration testing.
   
• Re-design of intermediary multi-signature wallet systems for all cryptocurrencies and blockchain assets.
   
• Prohibition of the use of generic logins for improved auditing of its systems.
   
• Additional segregated application layers within the system architecture to avoid escalation in case of intrusion.

Hong Kong cybercrime investigation still ongoing

Gatecoin said it continues to work closely with the Hong Kong Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau on the criminal investigation into its system breach.

Gatecoin has provided more details about this relaunch here.