One Reason Why Shapeshift and Gatecoin Didn't Get Crushed and Other Hacked Exchanges Did

I'm beginning to believe that you cannot consider yourself a serious or experienced member of the digital currencies community unless you've lost or had some major portion of your assets locked up in a major exchange hack. In the last couple years we've seen a myriad of exchanges come and go. Most of the time, when an exchange gets breached, regardless of the circumstances, it goes under. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this.

Gatecoin being a recent example of one exchange that is trying its hardest to climb from the ashes of a major, multi-million dollar hack. As it has communicated publicly about its intentions to progressively reimburse its customers as well as re-open for trading, Gatecoin's brand seems to have stayed in tact more or less due to the leadership acting quickly and decisively to address the problem. We also saw this with Shapeshift.io's post-hack timeline where they went down for some time, communicated openly about what they were going to do about it and how they'd improve before re-opening.

How many of these so-called hacks are inside jobs and to what capacity are they orchestrated from within? Many people believe that most if not all major hacks associated with exchanges are inside jobs. Gatecoin and Shapeshift both publicly confirmed their hacks to be inside jobs. Cryptsy, Mt. Gox and even Bitfinex have been accused by some of being inside jobs as well. Time and transparency will tell in the long run which exchanges were hacked from within. What could be revealed even sooner by this specific piece of information is whether the exchange just comes out and admits their vulnerability and addresses it head on.

Some of the exchanges can't and won't admit their mistakes because at the highest level of the companies were either incompetent leaders or straight up crooks. However, for those who suffered hacks of any circumstances and admitted their faults and transparently improved on them, they'll likely continue to improve, regain customers trust and gain even more market share as the landscape of cryptocurrency exchanges evolves.