Bitfinex’s Cold Wallets are Being Drained of Bitcoin

The balance of Bitfinex’s BTC cold wallet is steadily dropping. On-chain metrics indicate a significant decline in the exchange’s BTC holdings.

Bitfinex’s BTC Balances See a Drop

Some in the cryptocurrency space have been noticing that the amount of BTC in Bitfinex’s cold wallet seems to be declining. This comes at a time when its own Tether Treasury (USDT) has been printing like never before — over $1 billion issued in less than a month. As one user points out, Bitfinex has seen an outflow of 57,000 BTC in just 70 days. That’s around $441M at current prices. In December 2019, BeInCrypto reported that Bitfinex had some 146,000 BTC in its cold wallet at the time. This number steadily increased since but is now sharply declining.

Bitfinex Tries to Correct the Record

A recent tweet by Zack Voell (@Zackvoell) has been getting significant buzz. It showed that over 176,000 BTC had been withdrawn in the past 30 days from Bitfinex. It was a stunning number that caught many people’s attention. However, Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino was quick to comment that it was apparently incorrect because “it is not considering correctly change addresses.” He also added that “Finex is definitely in the middle of some major OTC deals, but still the number seems off to me.” The culprit was apparently that ViewBase, responsible for compiling these numbers, was incorrectly counting for bech32 addresses. Since then, a correction has been issued, but the numbers are still high. ViewBase now finds that 52,542 BTC ($407M) has been withdrawn from Bitfinex in the past 30 days. For comparison, the exchange that saw the second-highest amount of withdrawals in this period was Kraken with 4,892 BTC ($38M) withdrawn.

Tether Treasury Tops $7.5 Billion Issued

The declining BTC in Bitfinex’s cold wallets is in sharp contrast to its record-breaking rate of USDT issuances. There is supposedly a ‘surge’ in demand for USD-backed altcoins, but only the Tether Treasury seems to be issuing significantly more. Just recently, BeInCrypto reported that Tether issued another $15M USDT on the TRON network — a rarity in the past few months. Tether Treasury is known for spreading out its USDT on multiple networks. As it stands now, the Tether Treasury reports that there is now over $7.5 billion USDT that has been issued, as per its transparency report. For comparison, it broke the $7 billion mark on April 19.