BitGrail cryptocurrency exchange hacked, stolen 170 million dollars

Cryptocurrency exchanger BitGrail reported a loss of 17 million Nano, valued at $ 170 million.

Breaking

In the past, the exchanger BitGrail was one of the largest centres for cryptocurrency RaiBlocks, which was recently renamed to Nano.

According to a statement on the website BitGrail, the exchange’s management discovered the “unauthorized transactions” that led to the loss of 17 million Nano. All operations with this cryptocurrency was temporarily suspended, and the exchange’s management also appealed to relevant authorities to investigate the incident.

Prehistory. Policy changes BitGrail

On January 30, the owner BitGrail Francesco Pirano announced on Reddit that the policy of KYC will become the norm on the stock exchange due to increasing pressure from regulators. Until this verification process has been necessary only to increase the limits for deposits and withdrawals.

This was followed by another change: for input and output of funds under the new rules, you could only use bitcoin.

Bitgrail is implementing KYC policy. Daily limits:level 1 (unverified): 0.5 BTC level 2: 1.5 BTCThe check may require up to 24 hours.— BitGrail Exchange (@BitGrail) December 19, 2017

Immediately after this became known, the price of Nano dropped from $ 18 to $ 12.89.

In trying to explain the change, users began to build different theories. According to one, the exchange plans a Scam-exit, i.e. to close without possibility of withdrawal users. Users of the exchange even began to unite for the purpose of filing a class action against the management of the exchange.

However, as it turned out, it was different.

Statement of team Nano

According to the statement the team problem the Nano, which led to the loss of resources is not at the Protocol level, as claimed by the owner of the exchange, and the system BitGrail.

Last Thursday, the design team contacted the owner of the exchange, Francesco Pirano and informed about the loss of funds from your wallet BitGrail. According to the developers, Hirano insisted on a fork, to neutralize the effects of hacking. However, one of the developers of Nano, Zach Shapiro noted that this situation persisted for several months. According to the developers, the problem of the exchange is insolvent, not that it was hacked:

Now we have reasonable grounds to believe that Hirano misled the command Nano and the community about the solvency of the exchanger BitGrail for a considerable period of time.

Despite this the developers, Francesco Pirano continues to assert that the funds were missing because of a problem in the Protocol, and not from the insolvency exchange.

NANO on BitGrail have been stolen.Unfortunately there is no way to give it back to you at 100% (we only got 4 MLN XRN right now).The devs, as you have guessed, dont want to collaborate— Francesco The Bomber (@bomberfrancy) February 9, 2018

After all this became public, the price of the Nano fell from 11.78 to $ 9.12 USD and is still in a downtrend.