Francesco Firano, owner of XRB’s biggest exchange Bitgrail, has suddenly announced 15,000,000 XRB, worth around $150 million, has moved from Bitgrail without authorization.

In revealed discussions with Railblock rebranded Nano developers, the man who allegedly is called Francesco Firano said:

“Due to an xrb bug that caused the node to crash, the attackers forced the system to get double payments for which we have no trace of time due to another bug in xrb official explorer.”

Nano developers said there is no bug, with one of them suggesting allegedly unauthorized withdrawals from Bitgrail had been going on for months. They say:

“From our own preliminary investigation, no double spending was detected on the ledger and we have no reason to believe the loss was due to an issue in the Nano protocol. The problems appear to be related to BitGrail’s software.”

Quite interestingly, Firano claims you can’t tell the time of withdrawals on the blockchain explorer, but Nano developers did not seem to agree. Colin LeMahieu, a Nano dev, says:

“So if you know the date of transactions below and above as listed, you know about when the bad transactions happened. So find a deposit/withdrawl before and after and then you have a range.”

Firano replies with “yes colin we can have the last stored info to get the renge,” then quickly changes the conversation to “what can we do to avoid the worst,” with Firano proposing a fork.

The devs did not agree. One of the reasons appears to be that such allegedly unauthorized withdrawals had been going on for months. Zack Shapiro, another Nano dev, says:

“If withdrawals have been closed for the last month, how did you not notice this? Someone with allegedly withdrawing for weeks according to you via this ‘hack’.”

Firano says “currently no one know WHEN the hack was done becase there is NO date in chain.” Quite an incredible claim if true.

“We now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time,” Nano devs say.

Railblock announced at the end of January they were freezing XRB withdrawals, with many stating they had been unable to withdraw or get verified since December.

The timing of this alleged hack, therefore, has raised allegations of exit scamming, with the Nano dev team stating:

“We will not be responding to individual posts or accusations by Firano regarding this situation. We are preparing all information we have on the matter such as blockchain entries, screenshots, and chat logs and presenting them to law enforcement.”

Google shows little on Francesco Firano, but alleged pictures of Bitgrail’s owner, which we can not publish as they are unverified, are circulating on 4chan.

In similar situations blockchain detectives usually compile an amateur report of what the blockchain says happened. In this case it appears the Nano dev team is doing so too.

Such “report” might soon be “leaked” as the usually blockchain skills-lacking traditional authorities might not be in a good position to verify the authenticity of the data, with a public crowdsourcing process, therefore, potentially assisting.

Which means we’ll have to wait and find out whether this time bug has any legs as it does appear to be a very crucial point in this latest development.