Bitcoin Trading Platform Bitfinex Compromised, Issues Warning

Bitcoin trading platform Bitfinex is back in the news, but unfortunately, this time for the wrong reason.

The trading platform has requested its customers to desist from depositing cryptocurrencies to old deposits addresses after a suspected compromise. Bitfinex issued an announcement, Urgent action required today:

“Dear Customer although we keep over 99.5% of users’ BTC deposits in secure multisig wallets, the small remaining amount in coins in our hot wallet are theoretically vulnerable to attack. We believe that our hot wallet keys might have been compromised and ask that all of our customer cease depositing cryptocurrency to old deposits addresses. We are in the process of creating a new hot wallet and will advise within the next few hours. Although this incident is unfortunate, its scale is small and will be fully absorbed by the company. Thanks a lot for your patience and comprehension. Bitfinex Team”

We were able to elicit a response from Bitfinex which said that new deposit addresses are online and that the team is working on enabling withdrawals. Hopefully, everything will be okay in a few hours.

Social media platform Reddit saw users erupt on the news with reactions varying from questions, disappointments, and suggestions to even comparison with the Bitstamp hack. Here are some of the comments on Reddit:

“Some transactions have high fees again …. Same hacker as BitStamp?”

“Bitfinex regenerated deposit addresses for users. However, new addresses are still not multi-sig.”

“I hope they use Darkwallet to mix some of those … could use the liquidity.”

Darkwallet was recently ranked as the best Bitcoin wallet in the Open Bitcoin Privacy Project Report.

About Bitfinex

The Bitcoin and cryptocurrency trading platform is currently in its beta phase, and offers many advanced features including margin trading, exchange and liquidity swaps. Owned and operated by iFinex Inc., the platform is being prepared to operate under a fully licensed model.