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The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has declared that the over $9 billion recovered Bitcoin, stolen during the notorious 2016 Bitfinex hack, should be returned directly to the exchange.

This decision comes after a complex investigation that led to the recovery of assets once thought irretrievable.

The hack occurred in August 2016, when cybercriminals managed to pilfer nearly 120,000 Bitcoins from Bitfinex, one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges at the time.

This theft, which amounted to roughly $72 million at the then-current exchange rates, has ballooned to nearly $12 billion due to the surge in Bitcoin’s value in the intervening years.

Of this amount, the DOJ has managed to recover over $9 billion, which in court documents filed Tuesday argue should revert to Bitfinex.

The filing notes that not all cryptocurrency could be retrieved due to the intricate nature of the laundering transactions, with further legal actions ongoing to address those remaining assets.

The DOJ’s stance is that, legally, there are no specific victims in this case for the offenses of conviction, thus justifying the return of the assets to Bitfinex itself rather than to individual users or shareholders.

The Bitfinex exchange had previously managed the fallout from the hack by distributing the losses across all its customers through a recovery program.

This involved issuing tokens to affected users which could be redeemed for US dollars or shares in Bitfinex.

However, the valuation of Bitcoin has risen so dramatically that some users have questioned whether this compensation truly made them “whole.”

The individuals directly involved in laundering the stolen cryptocurrency, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, have already faced legal repercussions.

Lichtenstein was sentenced to 60 months in prison, while Morgan, known also as Razzlekhan in her music career, received an 18-month sentence for their roles in the money laundering scheme.

Their use of advanced laundering techniques, including crypto mixing services, complicated the asset recovery but did not ultimately prevent the DOJ from seizing a substantial portion of the stolen funds.

This case sets a potentially influential precedent for how hacked digital currencies are handled in legal systems, particularly regarding the distribution of recovered assets.

It also highlights the ongoing challenges and responsibilities of cryptocurrency exchanges in securing user assets against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

As Bitfinex prepares to receive back 94,643 Bitcoins, valued at approximately $9.3 billion at current prices, the implications for customer trust, security protocols, and regulatory oversight in the crypto industry continue to evolve.

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