Bitfinex at a glance
Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange run by iFinex Inc., a company registered in the British Virgin Islands and, since May 2026, licensed in El Salvador for its main exchange. Launched in December 2012, it is one of the few exchanges from Bitcoin's early years still operating. It offers spot and margin trading, more than 60 perpetual contracts, OTC block trades, tokenised securities and a peer-to-peer margin funding market. US persons are not allowed to open accounts.
Who owns Bitfinex?
Bitfinex and Tether, issuer of the USDT stablecoin, have common owners and executives. A February 2023 Wall Street Journal report put CFO Giancarlo Devasini's stake at about 43%, CEO JL van der Velde and general counsel Stuart Hoegner at about 15% each and investor Christopher Harborne at about 12%. Paolo Ardoino is Bitfinex's CTO and, since December 2023, Tether's CEO. USDT had about $183 billion in circulation in September 2026, according to CoinGecko, which is why the Tether link is the first thing most people want to understand about Bitfinex.
From a lending site to a professional exchange
Raphael Nicolle, an IT technician from Paris, built Bitfinex as a peer-to-peer bitcoin lending platform, drawing on Bitcoinica, an earlier margin-trading site. Exchange trading followed. Devasini, who trained in medicine at the University of Milan before running computer-hardware businesses in Italy, became the largest shareholder, and van der Velde became CEO in 2013. Nicolle kept working as a developer until early 2017. Ardoino joined in 2014 to rework the matching engine and became CTO in 2016.
The 2016 hack and the BFX tokens
On 2 August 2016 an attacker took 119,756 BTC, worth about $72 million, from customer wallets secured with BitGo's multi-signature system. Rather than file for bankruptcy, Bitfinex cut every account balance by 36% and issued BFX tokens, each representing $1 of debt. Holders could be repaid or swap tokens for iFinex shares, and by April 2017 every BFX token had been redeemed. Bitfinex also issued Recovery Right Tokens (RRTs), which pay up to $1 each from any funds later recovered.
In February 2022 US authorities arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan and seized about 94,000 of the stolen bitcoin, then worth $3.6 billion. Lichtenstein admitted to the hack, was sentenced to five years in November 2024 and was released early on 2 January 2026 under the First Step Act. Court filings in January 2025 supported returning 94,643 BTC to Bitfinex in kind. That is roughly 30% of the bitcoin the US government holds, and the handover has been slow and closely watched.
How Bitfinex makes money
On 17 December 2025 Bitfinex set maker and taker fees to zero on spot, margin, perpetual derivatives, Bitfinex Securities and OTC trades, with no volume or LEO-holding conditions. Ardoino said the company could do it because it had been profitable for years. The income that remains comes from:
- Margin funding: lenders set rates for USD, USDT, BTC and other assets, and Bitfinex keeps 15% of the interest they earn (18% on hidden offers).
- Funding and service fees: derivatives funding, deposits and withdrawals, such as a 0.1% fee on fiat bank withdrawals with a 100 USD or EUR minimum.
- Bitfinex Securities: issuance of tokenised bonds and equities under El Salvador law.
The last detailed numbers Bitfinex released covered 2017: $333.5 million of gross profit, $326 million of net profit and $246 million paid in dividends, as reported by Bloomberg in 2019. No audited accounts have been published since, so this profile leaves revenue blank rather than estimating it.
The UNUS SED LEO token
In April 2019 the New York Attorney General said Bitfinex had used Tether reserves to cover about $850 million held by Panama-based processor Crypto Capital, which had been frozen. The next month iFinex sold 1 billion LEO tokens at $1 each, raising $1 billion. Under the white paper, iFinex buys back and burns LEO equal to at least 27% of its consolidated gross revenues, plus net funds recovered from Crypto Capital and at least 80% of net recovered hack proceeds after RRT holders are paid, within 18 months of recovery. With trading fees at zero, LEO's old trading discounts matter less; the buyback commitment is what supports its price.
Regulation, banking and controversy
Bitfinex settled the New York case in February 2021 for $18.5 million without admitting wrongdoing and kept New Yorkers off the platform. The CFTC fined it $75,000 in 2016 and $1.5 million in October 2021 over off-exchange retail commodity transactions with Americans. A 2018 academic study reported by The New York Times argued that Tether-linked trading on Bitfinex drove about half of bitcoin's late-2017 price rise. Banking has been the recurring weak spot: Wells Fargo stopped processing its wires in 2017, Puerto Rico's Noble Bank ended the relationship in 2018, and in July 2026 US prosecutors seized about $84.2 million from payment firm Capstone, which court papers say processed much of its volume for Tether and Bitfinex. Both companies said they did not know about Capstone's alleged misrepresentations.
El Salvador as a regulatory base
Bitfinex Securities received the first licence issued by El Salvador's National Commission of Digital Assets (CNAD) in April 2023. Its first offering, in April 2024, was a $6.25 million, five-year bond paying 10% to build a Hampton by Hilton hotel at El Salvador International Airport, issued on the Liquid Network with a $1,000 minimum; Protos reported that early demand was slow. Bitfinex Derivatives moved from the Seychelles with its own licence in January 2025, and the main exchange received a Digital Asset Service Provider licence on 12 May 2026, by which time CNAD had licensed more than 70 providers.
Bitfinex vs Binance, OKX, Kraken and Coinbase
Binance and OKX are far larger by volume and listings. Kraken and Bitstamp share Bitfinex's long history but hold US and European licences that Bitfinex does not. Coinbase serves US retail and institutional clients, a market Bitfinex is shut out of. Bitfinex's case rests on depth in BTC/USD and USDT pairs, its lending market, low-latency APIs (it says orders are processed in up to four milliseconds) and now free trading.
What to watch
- Whether the 94,643 BTC actually reaches Bitfinex, and the size of the LEO buyback that follows.
- Whether zero fees lift volume enough to grow margin funding and other paid services.
- How US stablecoin rules under the GENIUS Act affect Tether and, through it, liquidity on Bitfinex.
- Further disruption to dollar payment channels after the Capstone case.
