BitFlyer founder seeks to reinstate self as CEO, leading firm to IPO: Report

Despite stepping down as CEO for three years, Yuzo continued to have a significant influence on the company being the firm’s largest stakeholder.

Yuzo Kano, the co-founder of Japan-based cryptocurrency exchange bitFlyer, is seeking to reinstate himself as CEO in a shareholders meeting next month, in an apparent bid to reinvigorate what he claims is a stagnating firm.

Kano resigned in 2019 following a series of management disputes but is now determined to reinvigorate the crypto firm and lead it toward an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the coming months, according to a Feb. 26 report by Bloomberg.

The former CEO also said he also wants to put Japan back on the map in the world of cryptocurrency.

“I will make it capable of fighting on the international stage,” the bitFlyer co-founder said in a recent interview.

*Kano shared the Bloomberg post on Feb. 27 to his 111,500 Twitter followers. Source:* *Twitter.*

According to the interview, if reinstated, he intends on introducing stablecoins to the trading platform, build a token-issuance operation, and open-source bitFlyer’s “miyabi” blockchain to the public, along with pursuing an IPO in the coming months.

Kano — who retained a 40% stake in the company despite stepping down — explained that during his time away as CEO, bitFlyer stopped innovating and launching new products and services, which he intends on changing.

It is “a company that produces nothing new,” he claimed.

With over 2.5 million accounts, bitFlyer is one of the larger cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan. Some of its competitors, such as Kraken, recently announced the closure of its Japan business on Dec. 28, 2022, while Coinbase halted its operations in the country on Jan. 18, 2023.

Much of the management issues experienced at the firm came in part due to regulatory pressures imposed by Japan’s Financial Services Agency in 2018 as a means to adopt more stringent money laundering policies.

He added that multiple CEOs have come and gone since then because they Kano, being bitFlyer’s largest shareholder, pointed out where they were falling short:

“It’s my responsibility to point out issues and demand improvement [...] I reprimand people when they cause problems, make false reports or fail to do whatever they are supposed to do.”

Nonetheless, the former CEO believes the “very strict regulations” set in place can serve as a “model for the rest of the world.”

North Korea’s Lazarus behind years of crypto hacks in Japan: Police

Coin Telegraph

According to the Japan Government, a common mode of attack for the Lazarus Group was phishing, who are believed to have focused more on crypto funds lately because they’re “managed more loosely.”

Japan’s national police have pinned North Korean hacking group, Lazarus, as the organization behind several years of crypto-related cyber attacks.

In the public advisory statement sent out on Oct. 14, Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA) and Financial Services Agency (FSA) sent a warning to the country's crypto-asset businesses, asking them to stay vigilant of “phishing” attacks by the hacking groupaimed at stealing crypto assets.

The advisory statement is known as “public attribution,” and according to local reports, is the fifth time in history that the government has issued such a warning.

The statement warns that the hacking group uses social engineering to orchestrate phishing attacks — impersonating executives of a target company to try and bait employees into clicking malicious links or attachments:

“This cyber attack group sends phishing emails to employees impersonating executives of the target company [...] through social networking sites with false accounts, pretending to conduct business transactions [...] The cyber-attack group [then] uses the malware as a foothold to gain access to the victim's network.”

According to the statement, phishing has been a common mode of attack used by North Korean hackers, with the NPA and FSA urging targeted companies to keep their “private keys in an offline environment” and to “not open email attachments or hyperlinks carelessly.”

The statement added that individuals and businesses should “not download files from sources other than those whose authenticity can be verified, especially for applications related to cryptographic assets.”

The NPA also suggested that digital asset holders “install security software,” strengthen identity authentication mechanisms by “implementing multi-factor authentication” and not use the same password for multiple devices or services.

The NPA confirmed that several of these attacks have been successfully carried out against Japanese-based digital asset firms, but didn’t disclose any specific details.

Lazarus Group is allegedly affiliated with North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, a government-run foreign intelligence group.

Katsuyuki Okamoto of multinational IT firm Trend Micro told The Yomiuri Shimbun that “Lazarus initially targeted banks in various countries, but recently it has been aiming at crypto assets that are managed more loosely.”

They have been accused of being the hackers behind the $650 million Ronin Bridge exploit in March, and were identified as suspects in the $100 million attack from layer-1 blockchain Harmony.

Japan Financial Services Agency