A group of unknown hackers moved around $ 26 million in stolen Bitcoin funds to Bitfinex yesterday during a hack perpetuated in 2016.
This transfer was reported by the Twitter account @Whale_alert, which indicated that seven transactions were conducted from the linked addresses, of which the majority transferred between $4.1 million and $4.8 million in BTC funds, accompanied by much smaller ones.
The movement of these funds comes a month after a group of transactions associated with crimes took place on the Bitcoin network, among which BTC funds associated with the 2016 Bitfinex hack were also mobilized.
It is worth noting that the numbers in Latin America have changed little since our report in May; however, in the world, the growth has been enormous in the period: in May of this year about 7,600 ATMs were reported, and they grew at a speed of 8, 6 daily.
If we review the growth of ATMs so far in 2020, we can see that January began with 6,362 ATMs. And if we go to September 2019 compared to the date, we find that the number of ATMs in the world has practically doubled, given that a year ago, there were just over 5,300.
Whatever happened?
A lot of personalities in the community searched for a scapegoat the moment the hacking happened. The most relevant one was Bitfinex itself, due to the possession of two of the three private keys, while others blame the weak points in BitGo’s model as well.
BitGo took to social media at the moment and released a clear statement saying that an internal investigation had turned up no evidence of a server breach on their end.
Some observers blamed the service for “blindly signing” the withdrawal of nearly 120,000 BTC and made serious questions about why no potential countermeasures were in place in the event of a movement of funds so big like that one. With 30-day transaction volumes just above 600,000 BTC, the hack was one-sixth of the size of the exchange’s monthly orders.
The status of deposits that are not denominated in bitcoin is a frequent question that some customers keep doing since the crime happened, Bitfinex stated that only its bitcoin holdings received the impact of the hacking. Other market observers speculated on whether the outage could lead to complications at other exchanges that could have been using Bitfinex as a source of liquidity. Bitfinex did offer an API and that it was at one time used by exchanges, though the primary end markets were mostly brokers and traders.
By: Jenson Nuñez.
