Dropping from its New Year high of $1.90, the NEM Foundation\'s XEM coin at the end of the month is hovering around $0.75. The loss of faith in the coin came after last week\'s $530m hack into the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange, Coincheck, which NEM’s President described as the \"biggest theft in [the] history of world.\"

The hackers are having some trouble, however, in disposing of their ill-gotten gains, as the currency was tagged. NEM have managed to trace the stolen XEM to an unidentified user account, whose owner had apparently tried to move them out onto six different digital asset exchanges. A NEM spokesperson said that the hackers were sending batches of 100 XEM to random accounts.

If they managed to move the funds, the hackers could then swap them for another cryptocurrency as an additional means of hiding their tracks, before trading them back into a fiat currency. This would make the stolen XEM very difficult or almost impossible to trace, although NEM have contacted the exchanges about the tagged coins. It is expected that some, at least, of the money will eventually find its way into the hackers’ pockets.

The XEM that was stolen accounts for some 5% of the total supply, but it nevertheless remains the 10th largest cryptocurrency in global rankings.