Customer chases Bittrex exchange over missing $6,000 worth of Bitcoin SV coins

Cheating is defined as acting dishonestly to gain an advantage. It’s also an accusation being thrown at cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex over its alleged failure to credit one of its customers his Bitcoin SV (BSV) coins—57 of them to be exact.

First, some background. In November, the crypto exchange suspended withdrawals and deposits of Bitcoin Cash prior to the November 15 network upgrade, which led to a hard fork from which Bitcoin SV emerged. At the time, Bittrex assured its customers that it would “take all reasonable steps to ensure that customer funds can be preserved on both chains.”

“Bittrex will make all reasonable attempts to credit our users BSV chain split tokens,” Bittrex stated, although the exchange stressed that it “will not recover incorrectly made cross chain deposits under any circumstance due to the lack of replay protection.” It’s worth noting that the BSV chain has applied replay protection, effectively bringing the hash war to a close.

For one user, however, the battle has just begun.

Twitter user @nomadiklyfe recently filed a complaint before Bittrex, claiming he lost 57 BSV worth almost $6,000 that are “stuck in an address” on the exchange’s Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) server.

https://twitter.com/nomadiklyfe/status/1075380468097449984

CoinGeek reached out to nomadiklyfe, who explained to us the incident, saying, “So supposedly they have a policy on BSV that any coins which were deposited incorrectly, i.e. if you sent BCH to your BCH wallet and that transaction as replayed over BSV network, they will not recover your funds. I have moved the corresponding BCH out and there would be no replay issue if they were to recover my funds. Their policy is not to do.”

Bittrex is based in the United States, where cryptocurrencies are defined as commodities. This means the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has the authority to prosecute cases of fraud and manipulation in the crypto space.

For nomadiklyfe, however, there is a simple fix: “Ultimately, I would like for Bittrex to fix their policy and return their users’ money, including my own.”