Nearly $185 million in bitcoin and ether was withdrawn from Bitfinex's cold wallets

About 17,250 BTC (~$89 million) was withdrawn from Bitfinex's bitcoin cold wallet at 6:35am GMT. The bitcoin cold wallet still has a balance of 102,285 BTC (~$525.5 million) at the time of writing. About 633,300 ETH (~$96 million) was withdrawn from Bitfinex's ether cold wallet today, according to TokenAnalyst. The ether cold wallets still have a balance of 1.62 million ETH (~$245.6 million) at the time of writing. In total, about 20% of Bitfinex's holdings of ETH and BTC was withdrawn today.

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It's not immediately clear whether the wallets where funds were transferred to is also owned by Bitfinex or whether it was triggered by Bitfinex's customers withdrawing their cryptocurrency to their private wallets. But based on the activity of some of the wallets, they appear to be processing withdrawals.

The withdrawal follows the news about New York State Attorney General (NYSAG) suing Bitfinex and the affiliated firm Tether. NYSAG claims that $850 million is still inaccessible to Bitfinex and that the firm has failed to publicly disclose the loss of funds. Tether posted an official response claiming that both Bitfinex and Tether are "financially strong" and that the "court filings were written in bad faith and are riddled with false assertions." Moreover, Tether said that the amounts "are not lost but have been, in fact, seized and safeguarded."

About Author

Larry joined crypto research full time in early 2017 and has expertise in capital markets, market structure and early stage DeFi companies/protocols and token economics. He has a background in economics and finance.