The company and the brand
Bitfinex is the platform. The companies behind it are iFinex Inc., BFXNA Inc. and BFXWW Inc., which the New York Attorney General's 2021 settlement agreement treats as one group and refers to collectively as Bitfinex. That agreement gives iFinex Inc.'s address as Trinity Chambers, Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands. The site's copyright notice is iFinex Inc.'s.
What it does
A custodial exchange whose distinguishing feature has always been leverage. Customers lend their own fiat and crypto to other customers through a peer-to-peer funding market, and those borrowers trade on margin. The CFTC's 2021 order describes exactly this mechanism, and it is why the platform's failures tend to be leveraged too.
On the record
On 2 August 2016 Bitfinex published a notice on its own blog: "Today we discovered a security breach that requires us to halt all trading on Bitfinex, as well as halt all digital token deposits to and withdrawals from Bitfinex." It confirmed the breach was limited to bitcoin wallets. The Justice Department later put the amount taken at 119,754 bitcoin, and announced in February 2022 that it had seized more than 94,000 of them after obtaining private keys from an account it had searched. That laundering prosecution is a separate matter and belongs to the people it concerns, not to this entry.
In February 2021 the New York Attorney General closed an investigation with a settlement agreement. The Attorney General found that Bitfinex and Tether had made false statements about the backing of the tether token and about movements of money between the two companies, that Bitfinex had suffered an undisclosed loss of funds held by a payment processor in 2018, and that both had traded with New Yorkers while saying they did not. Bitfinex and Tether agreed to stop trading with New Yorkers, to file quarterly reports, and to pay a penalty of USD 18,500,000. The agreement records that "Bitfinex and Tether neither admit nor deny the OAG's findings".
In October 2021 the CFTC issued a settled order finding that Bitfinex had offered illegal off-exchange financed retail commodity transactions to US persons and had acted as an unregistered futures commission merchant, in breach of a 2016 CFTC order against it. The penalty was USD 1.5 million.
Listing here is not endorsement.