The Hong Kong-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange has informed it will restore trading and withdrawing services a week after it faced a cyber attack that resulted in a loss of $75 million in bitcoins.
As Bitfinex wrote in an update, trading was planned to be relaunched on August 10. Exchange trading will be enabled for all currencies and pairs, while withdrawals and deposits will be allowed for BTC, USD, ETH and ETC. Exchange trading for Tether and LTC will be relaunched later.
On Monday, Bitfinex allowed users to access their accounts balances, but withdrawing and trading options were still halted. Right now all customers can check their balances which show a 36% loss.
Currently, it is unknown what exactly happened and how the bitcoins were stolen. According to the Bifinex team, the investigation process of the breach is underway and the police is studying the details of the crime.
Meanwhile, the company announced it will award the bounty to anyone who would help to find the stolen money. In a new post of Reddit, the exchange’s community director, Zane Tackett, announced that the company will offer $3.6 million for the recovery or any information that will lead of recovery of the lost bitcoins.
Since the incident happened, Bitfinex has been actively working on restoring its services. “In the past week, we have taken significant steps to ensure that we can restore service in a secure environment,” Bifinex wrote in an announcement.
“We have added additional platform and infrastructure security checks; regenerated all encrypted services, including wallets, security tokens, and passwords; moved funds to multisig cold storage; re-evaluated all third-party integrations; performed a comprehensive system audit in order to identify vulnerabilities; and, rebuilt our entire platform on new infrastructure.”
Bitfinex noted that it invalidated all deposit addresses created before August 9 19:00:00 UTC for all digital currencies except Tether USDT. The company warned its users not to deposit in these addresses as it will significantly delay the depositing process.
To compensate its customers, the company issued a new BFX token to each user equal to the sum they lost. Exchange trading on pairs BFX/USD and BFX/BTC will also be enabled. Bitfinex added they are currently working on some protocol level details. Meantime, customers in the US will only be able to sell BFX tokens, not to purchase more tokens.
As the exchange noted, it is still looking for potential investors who would help to compensate its customers. The users, the company earlier stated, will lose 36% of their bitcoin holdings. However, it assured that all clients, including those not directly affected by the hack, will receive their funds back. Besides, the attack affected the price of bitcoin, which dropped by 20% shortly after the hack.
The incident, occurred on August 2, has become the largest bitcoin theft after the hack of the Tokyo-based Mt.Gox. According to Bitfinex, it lost 120,000 bitcoins or about $75 million. The theft was limited only to bitcoin, with other virtual currencies and US dollars remaining untouched.
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