Bitfinex has set a deadline of 9th November 2017 for ceasing all services provided to U.S. individual customers. The announcement made by Bitfinex came as a follow up to an August issued statement indicating at the suspension of all new requests made by U.S. individuals for account verification. Bitfinex has made the announcement that they shall be terminating, “trading, deposits and withdrawal functionality for all U.S. customers.” The announcement has urged all customers to withdraw their cryptocurrencies before the impending deadline.
Bitfinex revealed its intention of shifting base from U.S. retail customers on 11th August. This move was in direct sync with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s warning which deemed the ICO as securities which need to be brought under proper regulations. Thus Bitfinex barred every U.S. customer from trading in ERC20 tokens which were previously issued via ICO medium. Biffinex, which comprises the biggest USD/BTC trading market announced that it had, “for some time considered pulling away from the retail marketplace in the U.S.,” because “a surprisingly small percentage of [Bitfinex’s] revenues come from verified U.S. individual accounts while a dramatically outsized portion of our resources goes into servicing the needs of U.S. individuals, including support, legal, and regulatory.”
Bitfinex stated that, “U.S. individuals holding Recovery Right Tokens (RRTs)… may, starting on October 27, 2017, sell all of their RRTs on the exchange” in light of their crypto barring stance. Its recovery rights tokens were set out for distribution among a bevy of “BFX token holders [who] have converted their BFX tokens to shares of iFinex.”
A devastating hack which occurred way back in August 2016 was the chief reason behind issuance of BFX tokens among Bitfinex customers. The attack fall out registered a 36% conversion of loss figures into BFX tokens. The same was repaid via unannounced and irregular installments as per the exchange’s discretion. Bitfinex stated that, “any RRTs remaining in the hands of U.S. individual verified customers after the November 9th deadline may be sold through Bitfinex on an OTC basis through special arrangement with us.”
Bitfinex has hiked up the level of scrutiny in the last few months following a rise in the number of ‘USDT’ or ‘Tether’ tokens. There were widespread speculations linking the use of ‘Tether’ by the organisation with a means to get across liquidity problems given the fact that the number of USDT tokens in circulation have increased by 500% approximately since the beginning of its issuance by Bitfinex.
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