Crypto exchange trade.io has announced that it is offering a USD $250,000 equivalent bounty to anyone who supplies information that leads to the legal arrest of the bad actors involved in the attempted breach on trade.io on Saturday October 20th, 2018.
In the latest response to the recent unauthorized access of 50M TIO from a single trade.io cold storage third party hardware unit, trade.io said that it has clarified public information surrounding the attempt, the potential value of TIO taken, and the effect on TIO holders.
The value of misappropriated TIO stands at a maximum potential value of $230K USD, but could be substantially lower. The company said that no customer wallets or the trade.io exchange were breached.
Although the 50M TIO tokens that were taken had a potential value of approximately $11.5M USD, apparently only around 1M TIO were completely accessed before action taken by trade.io and its partners thwarted any further attempted trading of the misappropriated tokens, thereby limiting the loss to an absolute maximum of 1M TIO, with an estimated potential maximum value of around $230,000 USD, before all associated parties could fully lock down the activity. The final value once the full effect of measures taken by trade.io have been assessed is likely to be significantly lower.
Jim Preissler, trade.io
Jim Preissler, trade.io CEO, explained that the unauthorized access had no bearing on client accounts, the trade.io exchange or liquidity pool, and all remain operational.
Thanks to the fast action by management and partners, it’s important to note that although the theft of TIO from a cold storage wallet is a major crime and inconvenience, at no point were client assets under threat. Technical security on the exchange and client funds were never compromised and have not been affected. The TIO that was taken was owned by trade.io and reserved for our lending facility, the liquidity pool, which has been operating smoothly and also remains unaffected. Protocol was followed to a T, and thanks to the good work of our team and partners, we’re now very close to a complete and swift resolution for more than 95% of TIO holders. All remaining cases will be dealt with on an urgent, case by case basis.
Roy Gutshall, trade.io COO, added:
Investigations are ongoing, but have so far concluded that there was no technical hack on the third party cold storage unit, and trade.io systems remain secure and unbreached. All exchanges listing TIO were immediately alerted to disable deposits, withdrawals and trading of TIO, and our security team began its investigation. The responsiveness by the various teams within trade.io prevented the situation from deteriorating and helped quarantine the issue. We are providing regular updates to media and our community, and have announced a detailed plan of action to fork TIO.
In order to protect all TIO holders, trade.io management has decided to fork TIO. The name of the forked token will be Trade Token X with the ticker TIOx. The fork will occur on October 24, 2018 by end of day New York time. TIOx will begin trading on October 31, 2018 exclusively on the trade.io exchange, with the exact time to be announced.
Given the fact that TIO was traded on multiple exchanges outside of trade.io, and some have been helpful in assisting trade.io, while others have not with respect to containing the breach, trade.io has devised a customized approach to reduce the impact as much as possible on TIO holders and make sure everyone is treated fairly.
The company said that full details on the TIO/TIOx fork have been released to TIO holders.