By
Steve Muchoki
April 23rd, 2024
Bitfinex announced that all trading, deposits, and withdrawals will be temporarily disabled.
Hong Kong-based digital currency exchange Bitfinex announced that it temporarily disables trading, deposits and withdrawals due to the hacker attack that took place on Tuesday.
“We are currently in an ongoing process of restoring limited functionality in a secure environment, with full functionality coming afterwards in progressive stages. The first step is bringing the site online and allowing users to login and view the state of their accounts. Note that initially trading, deposits, withdrawals, and other core site functionality will be disabled”, stated Bitfinex in an official notification.
Zane Tackett, Bitfinex’s director of community and product development, ensured that the investigation on the hacker attack is in process. He claimed on social media website Reddit that the company is “settling all positions, not liquidating.”
Bitfinex warned that all withdrawals, open orders, and open funding offers will be canceled in order to accommodate the relaunch. Meanwhile, settlement will occur in the affected accounts to compute losses for relevant parties.
Bitfinex runs one of the largest exchanges for trading cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ether, and litecoin. On Tuesday, the company made a shocking announcement about the theft of $75 million of bitcoin.
The theft at Bitfinex was limited only to bitcoin, however the exchanges has halted trading in all digital currencies, including ethereum. US dollar deposits were not touched.
Bitfinex has confirmed that it lost 119,756 bitcoin as a result of hacker attack. Immediately, the exchange made an announcement: “We are investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen. We are undertaking a review to determine which users have been affected by the breach. While we conduct this initial investigation and secure our environment, bitfinex.com will be taken down and the maintenance page will be left up. We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation. We ask for the community’s patience as we unravel the causes and consequences of this breach.”
The theft became the second largest bitcoin theft since the notorious case of Mt Gox. As a reminder, Mt Gox was hacked in February 2014, lost about $350 million bitcoins, and filed for bankruptcy weeks later. That month Bitcoin prices dropped by 30 percent.
This time, the story repeats itself – bitcoin price fell significantly after Bitfinex announced security breach on Tuesday. As soon as the exchange confirmed the theft, bitcoin fell 11 percent. Later it recovered, and now trades at $579.13 on the BitStamp platform.