Bitfinex Investigation Causes 50% Drop in Exchange’s Ethereum Cold Storage Wallet

One of the leading crypto exchange platforms, Bitfinex, had about 50% drop in its available Ethereum (ETH), that was held in cold offline storage.

This drop was made known by Andrew Rennhack, a Twitter user, who said that the account had only about 1.1 million ETH left. Andrew Rennhack tweeted:

“Bitfinex ETH cold wallet has declined by 40% in the past week. 800k ETH or $150M has left. There’s only 1.1M ETH left or ~180M USD left at current ETH prices (which will not be this high for very much longer). This is a good old fashioned bank run folks.”

New York AG Investigation

Coincidentally, on April 25th, 2019, Bitfinex had a drop in its ETH cold wallet when the New York’s Attorney General announced an investigation into Bitfinex.

The Bitfinex Ethereum cold wallet as at the 25th of April approximately 2.1 million ETH, which when compared to the present estimate of 1.1 million ETH, has dropped about 50%. Another Twitter user, Dr_Cz, tweeted :

“Bear market is not yet over. They can put back eths when they will buyback at significantly lower prices.”

Bitcoin Wallet Drop

The Bitfinex Bitcoin wallet was also affected by this investigation announcement, as the cryptocurrency faced a drop also.

The Bitcoin wallet witnessed a move of about 67 million dollars worth of BTC, and another 89 million dollars worth of BTC from Bitfinex, within a three-day span.

Earlier today, the exchange’s BTC passed the 6,000 USD mark, while the value of BTC is still below the mark on other exchange platforms.

Premium BTC Value

Bitfinex’s bitcoin (BTC) is currently valued at 6,057 USD with a 110 million in trading volume, with a premium trade rate (when compared with other well-known exchange platforms) of 400 USD.

Here's one of the cold wallets known to belong to @bitfinex.

As you can see the balance has dropped from 119k BTC on April 26th to 89k BTC at the moment.

Are people pulling out? pic.twitter.com/PlxC99bPlN

— Mati Greenspan (@MatiGreenspan) May 3, 2019