Crypto Exchange Offers $400 Million Reward For Returning Stolen BTC

One of the leading crypto exchanges to date, Bitfinex, announced the company is launching a $400 million reward programme for recovering almost 120,000 Bitcoin from the 2016 security breach.

Bitfinex CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that the company “will reward anyone with information that can put us in direct contact with those responsible for the 2016 security breach at Bitfinex”. Ardoino added that the ones, responsible for the attack would receive a share of the returned Bitcoin.

In August 2016, when the unauthorized transfers occurred, the price per BTC was around $650, which means hackers received a 1,600% price increase “bonus”, as of press time. A minor portion (27,6 BTC) of the 119,756 BTC, allegedly stolen from Bitfinex, was recovered by authorities in February 2019. Currently, the recovered funds are worth over $300,000.

Bitfinex further explained that anyone who puts the company in contact with the hackers behind the attack would receive 5% of the total recovered funds, leaving 25% for the hackers. The crypto exchange believes the reward would be a sufficient stimulus for hackers to step in and return the stolen funds.

In order to identify the hackers, however, Bitfinex demands at least 1 Satoshi (one hundred millionth of a single bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC) to be transferred from a hacker-related wallet address to a specific address, provided by Bitfinex.

“Any payments made to those connecting Bitfinex will work to ensure this can be done securely, thereby protecting the identities of all parties, and Bitfinex reserves the right to impose conditions on any transfers in order to verify claims and ensure a secure process,” Bitfinex disclosed.

However, the reward programme isn’t the first time when Bitfinex tries to give hackers a stimulus for returning the stolen funds. Shortly after the 2016 attack, the exchange offered a 6,000 BTC reward pool (worth around $3,5 million at the time) to anyone who connects them with the hackers.

“As the recent hacking attacks on Twitter and Ledger demonstrate, this type of criminal activity is still a threat for all businesses in the digital asset sector and the wider distributed ledger technology sphere,” Bitfinex concluded.

Meanwhile, the hack attacks got into the DeFi ecosystem as well. Opyn`s Ethereum protocol, which offers options, was hacked, resulting in losing $371,260 worth of USDC. Hackers conducted a double-spending attack to steal collateral from ETH put option sellers. In response to the attacks, Opyn`s developers managed to “drain” their own smart contract protocol and liquidate ETH put options, as well as stopping users from buying corresponding oTokens.