Representatives of the Livecoin cryptocurrency exchange, which was hacked at the end of December 2020, announced their readiness to start paying user funds.
The first assets will be reimbursed to customers with small balances – up to $ 5,000. The funds will be paid in full and customers will not suffer any losses, Livecoin assured.
“Part of the assets remained untouched, we will pay them in native form. The lost assets will be paid in stablecoins at the exchange rate at the time of hacking,” the report says.
To determine the balance of each client, the exchange will not take into account the trades held at the time of the attack – if they are available, Livecoin will “reverse the transactions with a refund.”
After processing all applications, the acceptance of which will end on March 17, 2021, the exchange will begin payments to the remaining customers with medium and large balances.
“We cannot do this until all verification requests are processed, as we need to have an exact number of verified client balances, between which all remaining funds will be divided proportionally,” the team explained.
The Exchange reserves the right to rebalance unclaimed balances from various altcoins into stablecoins and distribute them among customers who have passed verification.
“For example, if we have 100 coins in one or another native token, but only 30 coins are required for payments to verified customers, the remaining 70 coins will be rebalanced in USDT and divided among verified customers,” Livecoin explained.
To send documents, customers were asked to use well-known file sharing or cloud services, otherwise Livecoin will not accept the application for consideration:
“If exploits or malware are found in the submitted document, we will reject the verification application without the possibility of appeal. This also applies to applications already submitted.”
Initially, the platform set the start of payments for March 17, 2021, but later shifted it to an earlier date so that customers “were convinced of their intentions and applied for verification without fear.”
Recall that on December 24, 2020, the price of bitcoin on the Livecoin exchange jumped to several hundred thousand dollars, and withdrawal of funds from the platform became unavailable.
At the same time, Director Svetlana Geller deleted her Telegram account.
Users assumed that the founders of the platform made an exit scam.
Soon, a message appeared on the main page of the site that a “carefully planned attack” was carried out on the exchange, and the administration completely lost control over the servers, backend and nodes.
Unknown persons stole 106 BTC, 380 ETH, 236 BCH, 567 012 XRP, 66.8 million DOGE, 56,000 USDT, as well as an unnamed amount in ERC-20 tokens.
Hackers transferred all funds stolen in Ethereum to the DAI stablecoin through the Uniswap contract. The stolen XRP coins ended up on the KuCoin exchange.
On January 3, Livecoin representatives announced the move to the temporary Livecoin domain.news and noted that they managed to partially regain access to media channels. However, the only confirmation that the site is related to the exchange is an entry on Twitter.
On January 16, the exchange announced the closure and the decision to pay users the remaining funds. However, customers were outraged by Livecoin’s excessive verification requirements. In addition to document scans, the platform requested a video file showing the transaction ID of the first deposit, a person, a passport, as well as an oral confirmation of the full name, date and legality of the origin of funds.
The initiative group of the Russian-speaking community of Livecoin users recommended not to rush to send documents, since unknown persons who can steal confidential information are behind the mailing.
They presented counterclaims to the administration of the exchange: with coverage of the chronology and reasons for hacking, explanations about the reasons for the termination of the legal registration of the platform and data on trading volumes.