The development team behind altcoin Bitcoin Private has confirmed the creation of 2.04 million units of BTCP "That were never intended to exist on the blockchain," according to an official statement published Dec. 24.On Dec. 23, digital assets analytics website Coin Metrics published a report revealing that during the import of Bitcoin chain data, an additional 2.04 million units of altcoin BTCP - about $3.9 million at press time - were secretly minted.
Per the project's white paper, the total supply of BTCP is equal to around 20.4 million coins, while the secretly premined BTCP brought "The initial supply to 22.6 million."
"However, at this time, the source, purpose, and recipient of this exploit is currently unknown to the Bitcoin Private Contribution Team.".
The statement further cites the timeline of events regarding the issue, unveiling that ultimately there was a bounty posted for a specific issue, which was subsequently accepted by a developer, who then became a BTCP developer and was "Promoted to a contributor on GitHub, allowing him to merge pull requests."
The BTCP team further discovered that one line missing in the code "Allow[ed] the fork mine to be exploited due to the nodes not properly verifying the falsified fork blocks." Once the bounty was collected, the developer left the BTCP project.
The threat actor reportedly exploited the bug, creating over 2 million coins during the publicly announced fork mine.
The BTCP team further notes it is not clear whether those coins were transferred to an exchange or used or stored elsewhere.
The BTCP team also stated in the announcement that they had "No prior knowledge" of the incident before Coin Metrics' report was released to the public.
At the end of the statement, the BTCP team writes that they have contacted major crypto exchange HitBTC about the situation.
At press time, BTCP is trading at around $1.97, down close to 7 percent over the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
Altcoin Bitcoin Private Confirms Additional 2 Million Coins Secretly Premined
Published on Dec 25, 2018
by Cointele | Published on Coinage
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