UPDATE: BitFinex' Director of Community and Product Development, Zane Tackett, told Cointelegraph that "trading was not affected" and confirmed that the Bitcoin address posted in the article below does indeed belong to the culprit. He also said they have generated a new hot wallet "using a spare-machine designed especially for scenarios like this."

Original article:

BitFinex’s hot wallet has been compromised. The hack may have resulted in the loss of only 0.5% of the total funds, however, according to the exchange.

BitFinex tweeted:

Urgent Action Required: https://t.co/zo2NZOudVe Don't deposit to old BTC addresses. New addresses are online and updates will follow soon. — Bitfinex.com (@bitfinex) May 22, 2015

It has also has issued the following statement on its website:

“Dear Customer although we keep over 99.5% of users' BTC deposits in secure multisig wallets, the small remaining amount in coins in our hot wallet are theoretically vulnerable to attack. We believe that our hot wallet keys might have been compromised and ask that all of our customer cease depositing cryptocurrency to old deposits addresses. We are in the process of creating a new hot wallet and will advise within the next few hours. Although this incident is unfortunate, its scale is small and will be fully absorbed by the company. Thanks a lot for your patience and comprehension. Bitfinex Team.”

While the company is most likely creating a more secure hot wallet to restore operations, it has warned its users to stop depositing funds into old addresses. They also recommended not creating any new addresses until more information is released. BitFinex reassured its customers that accounts won’t be affected and that the loss will be absorbed entirely by the exchange.

Meanwhile, the Reddit Bitcoin community has been discussing the hack. One highly upvoted commenter may have located the address where the stolen coins are being funneled.

Though there is little information to confirm at press time, the wallet in question has received over 1,400 BTC (~US$330,000) in the past few hours. When asked whether this was the possible address, one redditor confirmed saying:

“My deposit 3 hrs ago ended up here. Yes.”

While we wait for the company to release more information regarding the total amount lost, it will be interesting to see whether the Bitcoin public ledger will help track down the perpetrator.

BitFinex currently handles approximately 10% of the total bitcoin trading volume and has traded 13,595.53 BTC in the past 24 hours.

Bitfinex is a trading platform that is currently still in its testing (beta) phase as it is being prepared to operate under a fully licensed model. The platform is owned and operated by iFinex Inc. (Bvi).