In the wake of disruption by hackers last week that caused Hong Kong-based bitcoin exchange Bitfinex to lose $72 million, the firm said customers would lose 36 percent of assets held through the digital platform.
But in an effort to soften the blow, Bitfinex said it would offer those same users tokens of credit, which would help stanch those losses.
The losses, as Reuters reported, would be “shared” across all holders and assets linked to the firm, which means that the impact has been “widened,” but also, as Bitfinex stated on its site, “this is the closest approximation to what would happen in a liquidation context.” The tokens being offered in the wake of the hack — which impacted slightly less than 1 percent of all bitcoin in circulation — can be redeemed by the firm or for shares in parent company iFinex.
The newswire said that a bit less than 120,000 coins were stolen from Bitfinex last week, standing among the largest breaches of cryptocurrency exchanges, as measured in dollar terms. Thus far, the methodologies of the hackers remain unexplained. The thought that weakness in blockchain and the decentralized ledger approach in general has been behind the hack has been denied by both the firm and cybersecurity experts.
Bitfinex said over the weekend that users should be able to access their accounts within the next few days. In the wake of the hack and its disclosure, Bitfinex suspended withdrawals and interoperability on its site, freezing transactions and other activities.
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