Bitcoin recovers, sets record after $31M hack of peer

Bitcoin hit a HONG KONG record high, shrugging off earlier losses posted after the US$31 million theft of a cryptocurrency peer renewed concern about the security of digital coins.

The company behind tether, a cryptocurrency used by bitcoin exchanges to facilitate trades with fiat currencies, announced the theft on Tuesday. It said in a statement that a “malicious” attacker removed tokens from the Tether Treasury wallet on Nov. 19 and sent them to an unauthorized bitcoin address. The company said it’s trying to prevent the stolen coins from being used.

Bitcoin climbed as high as US$8,339 in New York trading. The largest cryptocurrency by market value had slumped as much 5.4 per cent after the tether hack was declosed.

The incident, the latest in a long list of hacks that have dented confidence in the safety of cryptocurrencies, is likely to fuel the debate on Wall Street over whether digital coins are secure enough to enter the mainstream of finance. The effect seems short-lived on bitcoin, which after exceeding the US$133-billion value of McDonald’s Corp. over the weekend, erased its loss on Tuesday.

Tether, with a market capitalization of US$675 million, is the world’s 20th most-valuable virtual currency, according to data on Coinmarketcap.com. The tokens are pegged to fiat currencies, allowing users to store and transfer globally and instantly, according to the website. The company behind tether has said that the tokens are 100 per cent backed by fiat currencies.

Tether has become part of the bitcoin ecosystem because it helps exchanges facilitate trades against currencies like the dollar, euro and yen, according to Arthur Hayes, chief executive officer of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency derivatives venue in Hong Kong. Antimoney laundering and know-your-customer rules have prevented many bitcoin exchanges from opening bank accounts needed to hold fiat currencies.

The theft has revived concerns over tether’s viability. Skepticism had already been building after the company behind the tokens said in April that all international wires had been blocked by its Taiwanese banks. That fuelled questions about whether the tokens were fully backed by fiat currencies.

“If tether is actually fundamentally compromised, that will be a very big issue for many exchanges,” Hayes said. “The knee-jerk reaction was that fear.”

An email to the support address on tether’s website wasn’t immediately returned.

Tether’s users are unlikely to abandon it as long as it’s supported by exchanges and no other credible pegged token appears, according to Zhou Shuoji, a founding partner at FBG Capital, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency investment company.

That view may explain why bitcoin recovered from its initial losses.