$5 Million In BTC Were Just Moved From 2016 Bitfinex Hack

$5 million in BTC were just moved recently from the Bitfinex hack that occurred back in 2016 as we reported previously in the Bitcoin latest news.

While finding the stolen money during bank heists can be hard to trace, when it comes to crypto hacks it’s a completely different story. Hackers usually use mixing and privacy technologies as the coins they steal from exchanges and people can be tracked through the blockchain. This was shown to be the case with the BTC stolen from the Bitfinex 2016 hack. According to Whale Alert, the advanced blockchain tracker, two transactions $5 million in BTC were transferred from addresses affiliated with the hack from 2016.

⚠ 271.23 #BTC (2,582,633 USD) of stolen funds transferred from Bitfinex Hack 2016 to unknown wallet

Tx: https://t.co/iwsQ9xHcA2

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) July 24, 2020

The company shared this information through Twitter on July 24^th and it shows that a total of about $5 million worth of coins from addresses of the hackers were moved to an “unknown wallet.” It is unclear what these coins are being used as but there is a good chance that they could be mixed then liquidated via other platforms, venues, and exchanges. This could also depress the price of Bitcoin but it comes as a bigger concern than the hackers liquidating the tranche is the PlusToken scheme.

 

The PlusToken scheme was an infamous Bitcoin scam that grew in 2019 and accumulated billions in digital assets but the scam was mostly focused in Asia where it managed to scam over thousands of people by offering high returns on crypto deposits. The operators of the scam moved a huge sum of money in June which got the investors scared as Spencer Noon said:

“This week the following #PlusToken funds have been on the move to exchanges and new addresses for mixing: – 22k BTC ($203m USD) – 789k ETH ($183m) – 26m EOS ($68m) – 20m XRP ($4m). The big question: can the crypto markets absorb this volume or are we headed lower?”

It is not yet clear what has been done with the funds as PlusToken’s sales of coins are the reason that pushed Bitcoin lower in Q3 and Q4 in 2019. What is promising is the demand side of the market and the miner outflows. The data shared by CryptoQuant and Ki-Young Ju shows that Bitcoin miners are not liquidating off their balance sheets despite the halving profitability.