Hacker from the 2016 Bitfinex Breach Transfers $21M Worth of Bitcoin to Unknown Wallets

On Wednesday morning (ET), around 2,034 BTC ($21.6 million) from the 2016 Bitfinex hack moved into a few unknown wallets. The action was caught by the Btcparser program as five transactions with around 400 BTC each moved for the first time in four years.

On August 2, 2016, the popular digital currency exchange Bitfinex was hacked for 119,756 BTC which is around $1.2 billion in bitcoin using today’s exchange rates. The hacker was able to swipe roughly 18% of what was stolen from Mt Gox a few years prior.

Most of the stolen bitcoins sat idle for a little less than four years, but in 2020 the hacker has been moving lots of coins in batches. The last time news.Bitcoin.com reported on the Bitfinex hack coins moving was at the end of July when the individual moved around 2,500 stolen bitcoins ($28 million) from the 2016 Bitfinex breach.

At the time of the July 2,500-coin move, BTC was swapping for $10,350 per coin. On October 7, 2020, another 2,034 coins moved from five different wallet locations. The coins moved on Wednesday are worth roughly $21.6 million and the five transactions were caught by the blockchain parser Btcparcer.com.

The first move saw 389.94 BTC transferred and then another 400 BTC was transferred 22 minutes later. A minute after that, the Bitfinex hacker sent 399.31 BTC to an unknown wallet. The last two transactions stemming from the Bitfinex hacker took place in a ten-minute time span following the third transfer.

When the funds were originally stolen, the stash was worth between $66 to $72 million using 2016 exchange rates. Unlike Mt Gox, Bitfinex survived the loss and it paid customers back by creating one of the first exchange-backed tokens.

The recent $21.6 million worth of transfers follow the exchange offering a bounty for those who help catch the Bitfinex hackers. During the first week of August 2020, Bitfinex offered rewards up to $400 million for information concerning the malicious actors who attacked the exchange.

The news of the Bitfinex hack bitcoins on the move, also follows the recent and massive outflow of BTC from Bitmex that was transferred to exchanges like Binance, Gemini, and Kraken. The onchain data and analysis web portal Cryptoquant has also shown “unusual miner outflows” on Wednesday afternoon as well.

Cryptoquant’s alerts channel noted, “aggregated outflows from multiple miners” including a small mining operation and the mining pool Btc.top. The 2,034 BTC transferred stemming from the 2016 Bitfinex hack just adds more leeriness to the unusual onchain activity.