$250 Million Bitcoin Withdrawn From Bitfinex

[Mercury]

Bitfinex is seeing an exodus of sorts with more than 42,000 bitcoins, worth circa $250 million, withdrawn from the exchange’s cold wallet since the New York Attorney General’s order in or around April 24th.

On April 24th Bitfinex had just over 119,000 bitcoins, worth about $700 million. As of today, that has dropped to ₿76,000 worth circa $450 million.

Bitfinex cold wallet bitcoin address, May 2019.

An exodus from Bitfinex has been on-going since on or around September the 7th 2018 when their cold wallet reached a peak of ₿228,000, worth $1.3 billion at current prices.

Around that time, news of Bitfinex having some troubles with banks begun appearing. The situation then developed to the point fiat withdrawals were not possible for some weeks or were severely delayed.

Their bitcoin deposits thus gradually drop to about ₿140,000 with a Proof of Keys test further showing not all was well at Bitfinex.

Our article on that Proof of Keys test strangely attracted hundreds of comments on Facebook from hacked accounts, but their deposits remained at about ₿140,000 for much of winter.

They drop to about ₿120,000 in March where they stay until it was revealed that close to $1 billion was seized from Bitfinex related bank accounts by authorities.

There were rumors about $400 million was seized in April last year with suggestions this was drug-related money.

Just what exactly is going on in that front, however, is not very clear, but it looks like more was seized in unclear circumstances and for unclear reasons.
Just as we don’t know whether Bitfinex will be able to get back these funds, but what we do know is that Tether was apparently fully backed afterall until they loaned themselves this $850 million, making tether currently 74% backed with cash or its equivalent.

Bitfinex is now also apparently planning to have a token sale with the aim of raising a very coincidental $1 billion.

It might even work, but their bank problems continue as far as we are aware, with Tether becoming a very important tool of basically turning digital dollars into digital cash, but with quite a few problems as the actual cash is presumably still in bank accounts where it could potentially be seized.

Source

[MrSpasybo]

Is it a plan to manipulate the market based on the flow of BTC that they hold by issuing more USDT than their assets? Looking forward to the evaluation and judgment of experts.