The CEO of a crypto-currency start-up has been forced to resign after hackers made off with over $64m in Bitcoins last month.
NiceHash co-founder, Marko Kobal, made the announcement on LinkedIn at the end of December, and will be replaced by Zdravko Poljaševic.
“As you are aware, since the recent security breach we at NiceHash have been working round the clock to rebuild our internal systems as well as management structure,” he explained. “I shall now stand aside and allow new management to lead the organization through its next, exciting period of growth — therefore I decided to resign as CEO of NiceHash.”
Kobal is said to have sold his 45% stake in the company to an outside investor and majority owner, H-Bit.
NiceHash describes itself as the world’s largest “mining marketplace” — allowing computer users to rent spare processing power for others to use in crypto-currency mining projects.
A highly sophisticated attack revealed in early December allowed hackers to make off with 4700 Bitcoins from the firm’s digital wallet — well over $60m at today’s prices.
As the investigation is still ongoing it’s unclear exactly how the hackers compromised the Bitcoin wallet. However, an update from the firm explained that it had redesigned its payment system to create a “dual channel approach with manual creation and manual confirmation of every transaction that leaves our system.”
Although account balances lower than 0.0001 BTC will be written off, the firm has pledged to reimburse all other customers.
It said:
“We have now been able to reserve the funds required to restore balances from a group of international investors in our business. The exact date of reimbursement for old balances will be announced by January 31, 2018. We need this interim period to ensure all legal paperwork is processed correctly, so please be patient while we do this.”