BitGrail Reports Loss of Millions of XRB: Trading Suspended Until Further Notice

Reports are emerging indicating that one of the biggest Nano (XRB) exchanges in the past, BitGrail, has now shut its doors following a loss of millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency. The company’s official website is now only home to the notice informing users of the situation and the temporary suspension of trading activities.

Another Crypto Exchange, Another Hack

At this time, it is unclear who is in possession of the missing Nano. While Francesco Firano, the owner of the exchange, stated that the currency was lost due to a hack involving BitGrail, others speculate that the loss occurred due to the incompetence of the people running the exchange, including the owner himself, in which several glitches caused people to receive more money than they should have.

A blog post released by the Nano development team includes a link to an email conversation that took place between them and BitGrail owner, Firano. According to the transcript, Firano admitted to discovering the loss of the XRB from the company’s wallet. After that, he suggested that the team force an edit on the ledger to make it so that the fraudulent transactions never occured. The development team turned down the idea immediately, of course.

Given that BitGrail is a privately-owned entity, with no affiliation with the Nano currency or brand itself, the development team has announced that it will not be issuing a fork of the cryptocurrency to rectify mistakes, however major. This is an important consideration as the reported loss by BitGrail involves more than ten percent of the total Nano supply.

Nano’s team Suspects Foul Play by BitGrail

At one point of time, BitGrail and its competitor Mercatox, were the only two companies facilitating the exchange of XRB into other cryptocurrencies. However, given the overwhelming popularity of the digital currency, primarily for its feeless characteristic, bigger exchanges have also considered adding the currency to their trading platform.

Furthermore, the Nano development team’s statement clearly claims that the owner of BitGrail, Francesco Firano, was misleading the Nano Core Team. It is also likely that he knew of the exchange’s financial conundrum for a significant period of time before finally declaring it to the user base.

Finally, the Nano Core Team has stated that they are collecting all available data related to the situation, including “blockchain entries, screenshots, and chat logs.” It is likely that BitGrail and its owner will both be involved in significant criminal proceedings in the near future.

XRB Price Takes a Hit

Shortly after the release of the Nano Core Team’s blog post on February 10, 2018, the price of the cryptocurrency fell by over six percent to around $10. Only a month prior to the incident, the price of XRB was trading at prices upwards of $30. The crash that brought the entire cryptocurrency market’s market cap to sub-$300 billion levels also caused XRB’s price to tank heavily.

XRB-BTC (Binance: 1-hour)

The BitGrail situation has attracted many comparisons to bitcoin’s Mt. Gox hack that involved the loss of several million dollars worth of currency. That said, with Nano being officially added on larger exchanges, including Kucoin and Binance, in the past few weeks, it is likely that such concerns will be a thing of the past for the Nano development team.