Hack Sees Over $30 Million of Cryptocurrency Stolen. It has been announced that early on in this week a hacker group has hacked into Tether, which is a startup which offers digital tokens that are backed by dollars.
It is believed that the hacker managed to steal approximately $30 million in Tether tokens according to the company announcement.
The announcement has since been deleted from the website of Tether, but it did say that they had made attempts to try and recover these stolen tokens and to stop them from hitting the wider cryptocurrency market but with the deletion of this post it looks like they have been unable to do so.
The exact figure stolen is said to be approximately $30.95 million in tokens. Tether said that there would be a temporary suspension in their wallet service as they were trying to recover the stolen tokens, as well as updating software in order to try and prevent the coins from transferring to the address of the hacker.
This news comes as there was a lot of volatility in the markets on Monday evening, something which could have been a contributing factor. Prices fell in the space of an hour from $8,250 down to $7,820 which is a fall of $430.
The claims on the Tether website say that as their tokens have been backed by fiat money such as American dollars, this is how they manage to minimize the levels of volatility often seen in cryptocurrency markets. At the moment they are supported by the American dollar, the Euro and shortly by the Japanese Yen.
Each of their tokens can be sent, stored and received using the blockchain technology and can be exchanged for cash if preferred.
The temporary dip on Monday evening, however, did not last long as bitcoin managed to hit record highs on Tuesday, reaching $8,362.30 for the first time. This has been an amazing year for bitcoin and all investors as it has seen an increase in the value of 730% to date.
It looks like the news of the Tether hack had little bearing on investor confidence, a mere day after $30 million was stolen.
It is believed that many traders in the space of bitcoin have a policy whereby they sell first and then they ask questions later when something such as this hack occur.
This means that they are very aware of the latest breaking news in Bitcoin and don’t want to be overexposed in case things start to go south, having a conservative approach.
It is also down to the fact that Tether only has a very small portion of the cryptocurrency market and that any issues that they may have had or will have in the future do not have any impact on a fundamental level when it comes to the security, strength and health of the network of Bitcoin.
This network has been rising strongly since 2009 and it has come through worse times than this Tether hack.
While the S&P 500 has had a good year rising by 15%, it pales in comparison with the 730% rise of bitcoin.
