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In the beginning of this month, the Bitcoin industry witnessed one of the biggest hacking incidents of this year. Bitfinex, the Hong Kong-based digital currency exchange reported a security breach on August 2, 2016, which resulted in the platform losing about 119,756 bitcoins.
The total losses experienced by the digital currency platform is slated to be around $72 million at the time of the incident. Bitfinex is now back in business after temporarily suspending all operations for few days. As the investigation into the incident continues, the digital currency company has recently announced a bounty for any information about the hackers responsible for the theft.
The announcement was made on the social media platform Reddit, in response to a community member’s question. Answering the question “What is the bounty for the Bitfinex coins? Name a price in BTC?”, the community director for Bitfinex – Zane Tackett announced that the company is willing to offer 5 percent of the total amount recovered from the hacker. However, Zane further clarifies by saying that the bounty will be applicable only if the stolen bitcoins were recovered successfully based on the provided information.
If the information provided by multiple people lead to the identification of the hacker and/or recovery of stolen bitcoins, then Bitfinex will be sharing the 5 percent bounty pro rata, among all. Given the total loss experienced by Bitfinex, anyone offering credible information leading to the recovery of the whole stash will stand to receive close to $3.5 million.
In order to compensate the users who lost their bitcoin, Bitfinex has socialized the losses across all its customers. The balances held by all users on the platform has been reduced by 36.067 percent and replaced with an equivalent of BFX tokens. The company intends to reimburse the affected customers against BFX tokens on a later date. The platform enabled deposits and withdrawals on August 10th. As of yesterday, Bitfinex is fully operational.
Ref: BFX Status | Newsweek
