$3.55 Billion Worth Bitcoin From 2016 Bitfinex Hack Has Been Moved

Hackers who stole a funds from the crypto exchange Bitfinex back in 2016 moved a total of 94,643.29 BTC worth close to $3.55 billion at today’s price to a single wallet on Tuesday.

The stolen funds were distributed across 23 different transactions, which included various amounts of bitcoins, from less than one bitcoin to 10,000 bitcoins per transaction.

According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, “It is unlikely that these funds will be cashed out any time soon. Funds from this hack have been slowly laundered for over five years now and cashing-out large volumes over a short period of time would draw unwanted attention.”

In 2016 Bitfinex lost 119,756 bitcoins worth nearly $5 billion at current prices. The latest transactions represented 79% of the stolen coins.

Bitfinex has been working hard to recover the stolen funds. However, to date, it has only recovered about 50 bitcoins. The crypto exchange Bitfinex said that it is still working with law enforcement on the 2016 case:

“Bitfinex continues to work globally with law enforcement agencies, digital token exchanges, and wallet providers to recover the bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack.”

Majority of the bitcoin associated with the Bitfinex hack is widely tracked and blacklisted. Thus, hackers will have a tough time cashing out on prominent centralized exchanges.

The Bitfinex hack has been one of the largest in history of cryptocurrency. It forced the exchange to issue “Recovery Rights Tokens” as an IOU (I owe you) to customers. An IOU is usually an informal document acknowledging debt.

The Recovery Rights Tokens were traded as BFX tokens. In 2017, Bitfinex said it redeemed 100% of BFX tokens, allowing users to cash them out for their full value of $1 per token. All BFX tokens were then destroyed and trading of the tokens was stopped.