BitGrail Exchange Hacked, $170 Million In Digital Coins Stolen

Crime, Investing, News | February 12, 2018 By:

Italy exchange BitGrail has reported that hackers have penetrated its security and made off with 17 million units of digital coin Nano (trading as XRB), which was formerly known as RaiBlocks.

At a price staked around $10, the theft amounts to about $170 million USD. The cryptocurrency is one of the Top 30 on Coinmarketcap.com listings, with a market cap of $1.2 billion. The theft marks the second major exchange hack inside of a month. In January, Japan’s Coincheck had $400 million in NEM tokens stolen.

On Friday, BitGrail posted a note that its internal checks discovered the breach in part of its wallet.  “Today a charge about those fraudulent activities has been submitted to the competent authorities and now is under police investigation.”

All transactions on the exchange have been “temporarily suspended,” according to the note. A Twitter war subsequently erupted between BitGrail founder Francesco Firano and his Nano development team, with Firano threatening to press charges because of the dev team’s “irresponsible behavior.”  The tweet was not specific as to what that alleged behavior constituted.

The Nano dev team responded via a Medium post, claiming Firano had suggested altering the ledger.  “An option suggested by Firano was to modify the ledger in order to cover his losses — which is not possible, nor is it a direction we would ever pursue,” the Nano dev team writes.

Firano also noted via Twitter that customers were out of luck on the missing tokens. “Unfortunately there is no way to give it back to you at 100% (we only got 4 MLN XRN right now).”