Nearly 120,000 units of digital currency bitcoin worth about US$72 million was stolen from the exchange platform Bitfinex in Hong Kong, rattling the global bitcoin community in the second-biggest security breach ever of such an exchange.
Bitfinex is one of the largest exchanges for Bitcoin, and is known in the digital currency community for having a platform that has deep liquidity in the US dollar/bitcoin currency pair. A bitcoin expert said the scandal highlighted the risks of companies using cryptography for their ledgers. The volume of bitcoin stolen amounts to about 0.75% of all bitcoin in circulation.
Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development for Bitfinex, told on Wednesday that 119,756 bitcoin had been stolen from users’ accounts and that the exchange had not yet decided how to address customer losses. “The bitcoin was stolen from users’ segregated wallets,” he said.
