Nearly 120,000 BTC stolen from Bitfinex, Bitcoin price plummets 20% in 5 hours

The price of Bitcoin experienced a sharp drop early this morning. According to traders in the global market, this was related to the hacking incident that occurred on the digital currency exchange Bitfinex.

According to Zanetackett, the head of Bitfinex exchange, the trading platform lost about 120,000 BTC (119,756 BTC, worth more than 60 million US dollars).

In this regard, Wen Hao, the founder of Bitai Wallet, explained:

“After Bitfinex lost coins from its hot wallet last time, it upgraded its architecture to allow each user to have a multi-signature address, and then regularly settle the balance. This multi-signature address was built together with Bitgo. It sounds good and can achieve 100% reserve. In fact, it actually “upgraded” the cold wallet to a hot one.”

The market reacted violently to the news. According to data provided by sosobtc, in the past 24 hours, the price of Bitcoin on the OKCoin exchange fell from a high of 4,120 yuan to 3,151 yuan, while the price on the Huobi platform fell from a high of 4,043 yuan to 3,005 yuan.

As of press time, the price of the currency has recovered to around 3,582 yuan.

Market watcher and trader Jacob Eliosoff said the incident triggered a new wave of uncertainty.

“The big question is how much was stolen from Bitfinex and whether it will be able to reimburse its customers,” he said.

According to data from Bitcoinity, the Bitcoin trading volume on Bitfinex has exceeded 600,000 BTC in the past 30 days, which is equivalent to 1.6% of the total trading volume of 39 million BTC in the past 30 days.

Impact of Halving

However, Bitfinex’s problems do not appear to be the only factor causing the price crash.

The Bitcoin halving event on July 9 resulted in a 50% reduction in Bitcoin mining subsidies. However, at the time, this event did not cause price fluctuations.

Petar Zivkovksi, operations director at bitcoin trading platform Whaleclub, noted that the impact of the halving may be limited.

"There are still a lot of 'stubborn' bulls in the market," he said.

Tim Enneking, chairman of cryptocurrency investment fund EAM, explained that the recent drop in Bitcoin prices is a reaction to the halving, and he also pointed out that Bitcoin will find support above $500.

Some observers also believe that the drop in Bitcoin prices below $600 may indicate that market sentiment has changed.

For example, Joe Lee, founder of leveraged derivatives trading platform Magnr, said that the fall of Bitcoin price below $600 may indicate that its long-term fundamentals have weakened, and he also stressed that market observers will pay close attention to the price of Bitcoin.