Gatecoin was in July 2013 by a former investment banker, Aurélien Menant. It became the first cryptocurrency exchange to list ethereum's native token, ether (ETH) in August 2015 and has since specialized in listing ethereum tokens associated with decentralized applications.
Gatecoin was the only bitcoin technology firm being incubated by the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, a statutory body of the Hong Kong Government. Gatecoin was also incubated by the Tuspark business park in Nanjing.
Gatecoin joined The SuperCharger FinTech accelerator program sponsored by Baidu and Standard Chartered bank in January 2016. In March 2019, Gatecoin announced that it was liquidating its assets.
In 2016, Gatecoin experienced a cyberattack on its hot wallets that resulted in the loss of funds. An update from the exchange team indicated that as much as $2m had been lost. Gatecoin has claimed that it lost as much as 185,000 ethers and 250 bitcoins, an amount worth roughly $2.14m at the time. The exchange further said that it believes the hack first began on May 9, and that it continued over the following three days.
