Bitcoin drops 20% after $70M worth of bitcoin was stolen from Bitfinex exchange

Bitfinex, one of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges online, has suffered a major hack. The company has posted a note on its website detailing the security breach, and while it doesn’t mention a total amount, one of their employees confirmed on Reddit that the total amount stolen was 119,756 bitcoins.

That amount converts to about $77,000,000 based on a price of $650 USD per bitcoin, which is about what bitcoin traded at over the course of the last week.

After news of the hack spread, the price of bitcoin dropped almost 20 percent, settling in around the current price of $540 USD per bitcoin. It’s not exactly clear why the price dropped, but it’s likely bitcoin investors got nervous about potential hacks on other exchanges and decided to sell off their bitcoin holdings, which led to a rapid decrease in price.

So how exactly did the hack happen? It’s not really clear yet, and the exchange hasn’t released any additional information beyond saying they incurred a loss and are suspending operations, and that USD funds and other cryptocurrency balances haven’t been compromised.

We do know that Bitfinex’s platform used BitGo, a Palo Alto-based bitcoin security company that allows exchanges to provide segregated, multi-signature wallets for each customer’s funds. This is a supposed security improvement over exchanges that merge customers’ funds into large, communal wallets. This method of maintaining segregated wallets for each user on the exchange also means that users can keep tabs on their wallet balance at all times, which is how some Bitfinex users have been able to see that funds have been removed from their wallets.

BitGo tweeted earlier today that they “found no evidence of a breach on any BitGo servers.

So how exactly did the hack happen? It’s not really clear yet, and the exchange hasn’t released any additional information beyond saying they incurred a loss and are suspending operations, and that USD funds and other cryptocurrency balances haven’t been compromised.

We do know that Bitfinex’s platform used BitGo, a Palo Alto-based bitcoin security company that allows exchanges to provide segregated, multi-signature wallets for each customer’s funds. This is a supposed security improvement over exchanges that merge customers’ funds into large, communal wallets. This method of maintaining segregated wallets for each user on the exchange also means that users can keep tabs on their wallet balance at all times, which is how some Bitfinex users have been able to see that funds have been removed from their wallets.

BitGo tweeted earlier today that they “found no evidence of a breach on any BitGo servers.