BitGrail

In the murky depths of the crypto world, February 9, 2018, unveiled a grim saga for BitGrail, an obscure Italian exchange, as it announced a staggering theft of 17 million Nano (XRB) tokens, once called RaiBlocks. The heist, valued at approximately $170 million with Nano priced at $10 per coin per CoinMarketCap, was revealed through a terse website notice, blaming unauthorized transactions uncovered during internal checks, as reported by Forbes. Francesco Firano, BitGrail’s operator behind the Twitter handle @bomberfrancy, confirmed the loss, sparking a firestorm by accusing Nano’s developers of negligence and proposing a ledger rewrite to offset the shortfall, a notion swiftly rejected by the Nano team on Medium as unfeasible and unethical. BitGrail, handling just a fraction of Nano’s trades compared to Binance’s 80% dominance, suspended all transactions, with Firano filing a police report, though no funds were recovered in 2018’s loose regulatory climate. User anguish flooded Reddit, where one trader lamented a $1.4 million loss, trapped by BitGrail’s tightening withdrawal caps from 10 BTC to 1 BTC daily and ignored support tickets, hinting at deeper mismanagement. The hack, following Coincheck’s $530 million loss, exposed the perils of small exchanges, driving demands for robust cold storage, mandatory cybersecurity audits, and regulatory oversight to shield the crypto ecosystem’s fragile trust.