• The Bitfinex crypto hack resulted in the theft of 120,000 Bitcoin
• Ilya Lichtenstein used a series of sophisticated methods to hide the stolen funds between 2016 and 2022
• He told his wife and co-conspirator about the hack in 2020 who then helped him to hide the stolen assets

US prosecutors have told a judge that the mastermind behind the Bitfinex exchange hack should receive five years in prison.

Ilya Lichtenstein, who pleaded guilty last year after stealing 120,000 Bitcoin, was arrested in 2022. His wife and co-conspirator Heather Morgan was also taken into custody, in connection to the 2016 Bitfinex crypto hack. During their arrest, police seized Bitcoin worth around $71 million at the time of the hack.

According to Bloomberg, a court filing was submitted to the US District Court of Columbia, US prosecutors say Lichtenstein should receive a longer sentence than Morgan, also known as rapper Razzlekhan.

Last week, federal prosecutors recommended that Morgan receive an 18-month prison sentence given her “substantial assistance” in the case and the fact that she didn’t know her husband had hacked into Bitfinex.

Prosecutors argued that a stronger sentence for Lichtenstein would help deter young cybercriminals from attempting the same thing. According to them, this online activity is “normalized in a way that trivializes the impact on the victims.”

By giving a tougher sentence, prosecutors believe it will “help to break this cycle.”

Sole responsibility for the hack

While it was initially believed that both of them were involved in the exchange’s hack, Lichtenstein was identified as the primary person responsible.

It was only in 2020 that Morgan found out about what her husband had done and admitted to helping him hide the stolen crypto. Following the hack, Lichtenstein transferred around 120,000 Bitcoin into a self-custody wallet under his control.

Over the next few years, he withdrew 25,000 Bitcoin, laundering the stolen funds through darknet markets, non-compliant virtual currency exchanges, and mixers and tumblers, including Bitcoin Fog, Helix, and ChipMixer.

With Morgan’s help, the pair used the stolen funds to buy nonfungible tokens (NFTs), gold, and Walmart gift cards.

Prosecutors have not pushed the judge to give Lichtenstein the maximum sentence due to his assistance in other criminal cases. For instance, in February, Lichtenstein testified as a government witness in a money-laundering trial against Bitcoin Fog.

The pair are scheduled to be sentenced in November.

The Ethereum hard fork token (ETHW) has been popular after playing off the popularity of the Ethereum Merge. The fork was carried out in a bid to keep Ethereum in its original proof of work mechanism, and the ETHW token resulted from it. Chandler Guo is now known as the self-appointed organizer of the hard fork and he has shared his thoughts on where he expects the forked token to be in the next decade.

On Par With Ethereum

Speaking with Bitcoin News in a recent interview, Guo shared a very bullish outlook for what he expects to be the future of the forked Ethereum token. Presently, ETHW is only trading at a small fraction of the price of ETH, but Guo believes that this will not always be the case.

Guo shared that he believed that with time, ETHW would be on the same level as ETH. He gives it a decade before both digital assets will be trading at the same price as Ethereum. This would put the digital asset on a more than 100x growth over the next year, which Guo believes is possible. 

He points to the trading volume of the digital asset as evidence of this possible growth. “Already, the trading volume of ETHW is huge. Today it’s almost a billion dollars,” Guo explained. “As of today, ETHW is supported by more than 20 mining pools and 2,000 miners from around the world. More than 30 exchanges have listed ETHW.”

ETHW trending at $6.4 | Source: ETHWUSD on TradingView.com

This support that ETHW has received since its launch has been very important to its growth, and it seems to be driving Guo’s predictions. Also, development on the network has also been ramping up as far as decentralized exchanges (DEXs), bridges, and NFT marketplaces.

ETHW Price Down More Than 70%.

ETHW’s price had been trading at a high of $15 when it had initially launched. However, holding this value had proven to be a difficult task for the digital asset. It had lost more than 50% of its value just days after its launch.

Mainly, this was due to the dumping of the tokens by ETH holders who had received them for basically free of charge. Hence, it was expected that the value of the digital asset would drop pretty quickly, as is the case for most forked tokens.

However, Guo’s stance on the future price of the digital asset would mean that ETHW would do what forked tokens have been unable to do, and that is match up to the price of the original token. Nevertheless, the digital asset continues to hold up well in the bear market.

ETHW is currently trading at $6.20 at the time of this writing and is up 8.18% in the last 24 hours.

Featured image from Finbold, charts from TradingView.com

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