The thieves transferred a substantial amount of Bitcoin stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex six years ago to an unknown wallet in the early hours of Tuesday, February 1.
A Twitter account called Whale Alert has reported that a transaction of 10,000 Bitcoins worth more than $383 million was made during Asian peak market hours.
The total amount of the $10,000 that was stolen from Bitfinex is $383,060,670, with the amount transferred accounting for 8% of the 119,756 BTC that was stolen from Bitfinex in 2016.
A recent analysis of the Ethereum blockchain has found that the sum sent today has risen far beyond $3.5 billion. Chief Scientist and co-founder of Elliptic Tom Robinson tweeted:
“$3.55 billion in Bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack are on the move this morning – for the first time since August 2016.”
The last time the hacker made a transfer?
In April 2021, hackers moved the stolen Bitcoin. They transferred over $700 million worth of coins to unknown wallets amid a bull run fueled by cryptocurrency platform Coinbase’s then-impending IPO on the stock market.
If criminal actors try to cash out, they may try to use your money, causing markets to become jittery.
While the majority of the Bitcoins involved in the Bitfinex hack have been traced and banned by authorities, the Bitfinex team will have a difficult time recovering the funds stolen from their exchange.
This is because the current movement of hacked currencies poses minimal harm to the value of bitcoin in the short term. At the time of publication, the cryptocurrency was trading around $38,500.
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