Crypto exchange Bittrex announced the delisting of Bincoin Gold

The Bittrex exchange decided to delist Bitcoin Gold after the developers refused to compensate 12,372 BTG for losses resulting from an attack on the network in May.

Bittrex made the decision to delist after unsuccessful attempts to receive compensation from the Bitcoin Gold team for losses as a result of hacker hack in May. The double attack, the so-called 51% attack, which the exchange experienced on May 19 on the Bitcoin Gold network, led to the theft by hackers of 388,000 BTG worth $18 million. Using the rented power of NiceHash, the hackers managed to gain control of part of the network hash rate and re-spend transactions.

Bittrex holds the fork developers responsible for the losses and demands damages in the amount 12,372 BTG ($263 thousand at the exchange rate). The Bitcoin Gold team does not consider themselves guilty of the attack, blaming the vulnerability of the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism and the imperfect security system of the private Bittrex company.

According to the Bitcoin Gold team, the likelihood of such an attack being repeated is significantly reduced. After the successful 3rd Network Upgrade, the risk has decreased and most exchanges have reopened their wallets and reduced their verification requirements to Upgrade levels. Despite the best efforts of the BTG team to assist the site, and despite the fact that the threat has already passed, Bittrex has decided not to take responsibility for the BTG network.  

At first, the exchange was going to partially cover the damage from its BTG reserves, and asked BTG representatives to compensate the remaining 6,000 BTG. But for the fork team, this is too large a portion of the Bitcoin Gold project fund. The non-profit organization of the project does not have a stable income stream, rewards for mining BTG go to the miners, and most of the funds in the Foundation remain locked for future use - as a reminder, 60,000 of the 100,000 coins mined to create the Foundation are locked for three years, starting in November 2017. The team offered a BTG loan from the Foundation to help Bittrex solve short-term liquidity problems, but the exchange refused and insisted on full compensation.

The fork team suggests that Bittrex's impact on the Bitcoin Gold ecosystem will not be significant since Bittrex is not the only liquidity provider for BTG. The coin is traded on 29 platforms, including HitBTC, Bithumb, Binance, Bitinka and Bitfinex..

Since Bittrex takes up a small share of BTG trading volume, the developers are confident that the delisting scheduled for September 14 will not affect the Bitcoin Gold rate.