As bitcoin surpassed its 2017 all-time high on Monday morning, a few hours later 5,045 BTC or $97 million worth of bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack was transferred. The hackers that stole the funds four years ago have moved the bitcoins numerous times this year.
The hackers that stole 119,756 BTC from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex on August 2, 2016, have moved a number of stolen coins in 2020. The coins that were taken over four years ago are now worth around $2.3 billion using today’s exchange rates.
Following the Bitfinex hack, the breach crippled trader confidence that day as BTC slid more than 22% across global exchanges on August 2, 2016. The coins did not move for three years until the summer of 2019, the stolen coins started moving again.
On Monday, November 30, 2020, the Bitfinex hackers transferred a large sum of bitcoins as approximately 5,045 BTC were moved. The action was caught by the blockchain parser Btcparser.com, a platform that crawls the BTC blockchain to catch old coinbase reward awakenings and addresses that stem from the Bitfinex hack.
Using today’s exchange rates, the 5,045 BTC is worth more than $97 million. Bitcoin (BTC) touched an all-time high on the exchange Bitstamp reaching $19,864 per coin.
Data from Btcparser.com and the blockchain explorer Blockchair shows the 5,045 BTC was separated into separate addresses and some were combined. 14 transactions were sent and confirmed in blocks 659,373 and 659,374.
Blockchair’s Privacy-o-meter shows the transactions sent by the Bitfinex hackers were not very private, receiving a low score of 55. The tool shows whether or not a transaction is susceptible to some of the heuristics used by numerous transaction tracing tools. The bitcoins moved on Monday from the Bitfinex hack look as though if they were simply swept into a different address.
What do you think about the Bitfinex hackers moving 5,045 bitcoin stemming from the 2016 breach? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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