BTC-e

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BTC-e
Industry Bitcoin Exchange
Founded 2011
Headquarters Russia
Website btc-e.com

BTC-e was a cryptocurrency trading platform until the U.S. government seized their website.[1][2] It was founded in July 2011 and as of February 2015 handled around 3% of all Bitcoin exchange volume.[3] Until the 25th of July 2017, it allowed trading between the U. S. dollar, Russian ruble and euro currencies, and the bitcoin, litecoin, namecoin, novacoin, peercoin, dash and ethereum cryptocurrencies.

It was a component of the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index since the index started in September 2013.[4]

BTC-e was operated by ALWAYS EFFICIENT LLP which is registered in London and is listed as having 2 officers: Sandra Gina Esparon and Evaline Sophie Joubert and two people with significant control: Alexander Buyanov and Andrii Shvets.[5]

The US Justice Dept attempted to close down BTC-e on the 26th of July 2017 when they charged Alexander Vinnik and BTC-e in a 21-count indictment for operating an alleged international money laundering scheme and allegedly laundering funds from the hack of Mt. Gox[2][6].

History[edit]

BTC-e started in July 2011, handling a few coin pairs, including Bitcoin/U. S. dollar and I0Coin to Bitcoin. By October 2011, they supported many different currency pairs, including Litecoin to dollars, Bitcoin to rubles and RuCoin to rubles.[7]

During 2013 and 2014, BTC-e had many outages related to distributed denial of service attacks.[8] They later began using the reverse proxy service CloudFlare to help mitigate these attacks, reducing downtime for the exchange.

The BTC-e website has been offline since 25 July 2017, following the arrest of BTC-e staff members and the seizure of server equipment at one of their data centres. In addition, suspected BTC-e operator Alexander Vinnik was arrested while vacationing with his family in Greece. These events led to the closure of the BTC-e service.[9][10]

On 28 July 2017, US authorities seized the BTC-e.com domain name and 38% of all customer funds. To repay its customers BTC-e created WEX tokens, which were used to represent customers' stolen equity. The WEX tokens represented $1 and were issued to account for the value of customers cryptocurrencies at the time of the theft.

Greek Supreme Court cleared extradition of Vinnik to the US on December 13, 2017.[11]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Benjamin Guttmann (2014). "The Bitcoin Bible Gold Edition". Books on Demand. pp. 175–176. ISBN 9783732296965. 
  2. ^ a b "Russian National And Bitcoin Exchange Charged In 21-Count Indictment For Operating Alleged International Money Laundering Scheme And Allegedly Laundering Funds From Hack Of Mt. Gox". 
  3. ^ "Bitcoin Exchanges Market Share". Bitcoinity. Retrieved 2015-02-10. 
  4. ^ Del Rey, Jason (September 11, 2013). "What's a Bitcoin Really Worth? CoinDesk Thinks It Has the Answer". All Things D. 
  5. ^ "ALWAYS EFFICIENT LLP - Overview". 
  6. ^ "Vinnik Superseding Indictment Redacted for U.S. District Court Northern District of California San Francisco Division Case No CR 16-00227 SI". 
  7. ^ BTC-e (2011-10-25). "Start trading on a pairs of BTC/RUB, LTC/USD, RUC/RUB, USD/RUB!". Retrieved 2015-11-20. 
  8. ^ Jonathon Millet @ NewsBTC. "BTC-e Reports DDOS Attack Against Their Server". 
  9. ^ "Russian National And Bitcoin Exchange Charged In 21-Count Indictment For Operating Alleged International Money Laundering Scheme And Allegedly Laundering Funds From Hack Of Mt. Gox". 
  10. ^ "Russian wanted in US caught in Greece for money laundering". The Daily Star Newspaper - Lebanon. 2017-07-26. Retrieved 2017-07-28. 
  11. ^ "Greek top court clears way for U.S. extradition of Russian cybercrime". Reuters. 13 December 2017. Retrieved 2017-12-14. 
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