Bitcoin Private sends legal letter to HitBTC; claims "questionable, unjustifiable" delisting

Bitcoin Private, the privacy-centric cryptocurrency, has sent a legal letter to cryptocurrency exchange HitBTC, the project announced on Saturday. The legal letter details the events that led up to the coin's delisting from HitBTC.

According to the letter, in May 2018, Bitcoin Private paid HitBTC "a listing fee in the amount of $500,000.00 USD, to be paid in bitcoin." Subsequently, in December 2018, a CoinMetrics analysis uncovered the existence of approximately 2 million additional BTCP units that were covertly mined. In response, Bitcoin private core developers pushed for a coinburn to remove these units from circulation. The coinburn event required exchanges and users to move their current BTCP tokens to a new wallet before block 480,000, otherwise, their tokens would also be removed from circulation.

According to Bitcoin Private, the HitBTC team failed to take the appropriate measures and "lost its BTCP [58,920] holdings due to the coinburn." The exchange then "demanded that BTCP compensate those lost coin— stating that the reason they were unable to protect their BTCP from the Coinburn was the fault of BTCP responsibility." The exchange then delisted BTCP from its platform.

HitBTC, however, claims that its team "reached out to BTCP developers team with a request to help moving BTCP coins from a wallet that would not be safeguarded from a coin burn" but the team "could not provide us a reliable secure instrument to move the funds from the segwit addresses before the hard fork, which resulted in them burning a part of the funds still remaining in our custody."