Digital currency exchange Bitfinex today announced it has bought back all of the remaining cryptographic tokens it used to reimburse investors who lost funds in its August 2016 hack.
Citing increased equity conversions and strong operating results, Bitfinex reduced its internal reserves to purchase the remaining tokens at their $1 face value, and moved to shut down the markets associated with them.
At press time, officials at the exchange said all so-called 'BFX tokens' have been destroyed, and that investors have been reimbursed with US dollars.
The redemption occurred today beginning at 20:00:00 UTC, with fund requests settling within 45 minutes. During that time, trading of the BFX token was halted and all margin positions were liquidated.
The move follows the August 2016 hack of the exchange, in which investors were given a 36% haircut to compensate for a hack that drained 120,000 BTC from the exchange’s reserves. The BFX tokens thus represented an equity obligation to return the 36% back to platform users sometime in the future.
Notably, this isn't the first internal BFX buyback orchestrated by Bitfinex, as the exchange purchased 1% of the tokens in September 2016.
The $1 face value tokens had traded between $0.49 and $0.65 for most of 2016, surrounded by doubts that the exchange would never be able to recoup the nearly $72m in value lost following the security breach. That price increased to $0.89 by 1 March 2017 following a strong period of heavy trading volume in the cryptocurrency markets.
The announcement posted on the company's webpage expressed gratitude for the patience of the community and continued support.
Bitfinex wrote:
"We are tremendously grateful to all of our customers and new shareholders for helping us get to this point."
As of 21:00:00 UTC, CoinDesk has confirmed BFX tokens are being redeemed at the stated $1 face value.
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Very well Bitifinex!