Bitcoin (BTC) price hits new high cracking $8,300 despite £30m Tether hack which sent it plunging
Bitcoin took a serious plunge after an exchange revealed it was hacked and $30m stolen. But that didn’t hold it back for long.
More than $400 was wiped from the value of the cryptocurrency which dropped five per cent over night after Tether, an exchange where cryptocurrencies are pegged to traditional currencies, said it had discovered the security flaw and theft.
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The price soon recovered, shooting past the $8,300 for the first time and touching a new record high of $8,362 later in the day. It first cracked the $8,000 mark only on Monday.
And the hack also sent Ethereum plunging sharply by a similar percentage to $350.69. It has since recovered to trade above $365 at pixel time.
“Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet through malicious action by an external attacker,” said Tether
“$30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address. As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of the stolen tokens, and we are in the process of attempting token recovery to prevent them from entering the broader ecosystem.”
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Tether, based in the Isle of Man and Hong Kong, was founded by well-known bitcoin and blockchain entrepreneur Brock Pierce, a former child actor.
“The incident is the latest in a long series of hacks which should in theory dent investors confidence in the market, however they have once more stepped in unperturbed and seen the pullback as a buying opportunity in the runaway bull market,” said XTB chief market analyst David Cheetham.
The latest run puts bitcoin’s rise since the start of the year at 765 per cent. Several analysts have predicted that it will finish at $10,000 in 2017.
Mike Novogratz a former top hedge fund manager at Fortress Investment who has now set up his own crypto fund, today said in an interview with Bloomberg that he expects it to finish there by the end of the year, pushing bitcoin’s price higher as a result.