News of Bitfinex losing its chief strategist went viral over the weekend without any comments from the exchange’s officials about what led to his departure.
Almost immediately, speculators sprang into action and voiced all kinds of theories.
Let’s discuss.
Chief strategist for Bitfinex no more
The departing strategist is Phil Potter. He wasn’t fired. He made the personal decision to leave the outfit.
In a statement, Potter said:
“As Bitfinex pivots away from the U.S., I felt that, as a U.S. person, it was time for me to rethink my position as a member of the executive team.”
Not only is Potter stepping down from his role at Bitfinex, but he’s abandoning the same position at Tether, the exchange’s affiliate.
Bitfinex responds
Jan Ludovicus van der Velde, chief executive officer of Bitfinex and Tether, will take over Potter’s responsibilities while a permanent person is sought to fill his shoes. van der Velde stated the following about Potter’s departure.
“Phil has been instrumental in developing our business as a key senior team member over the past four years. Bitfinex will continue to focus on strategic global initiatives while Phil pursues other opportunities.”
In reporting the departure, Reuters stated Potter referred to “new opportunities” in the days ahead, but he did not elaborate.
Bifinex’s woes
While Potter says he didn’t want to stay with the outfit as it moved to other countries, it must be discussed that his announcement comes in the wake of several events that didn’t reflect well on Bitfinex.
We reported at the beginning of the month about Bitfinex frightening investors when the exchange went offline. Exchange officials put out a note saying the exchange was going offline for a few hours to undergo unexpected maintenance issues.
The outfit released the following statement about being attacked.
“The cause of the outage has been identified. A DDoS attack was launched soon after we restarted operations. The previous outage was caused by issues with one of our infrastructure providers. While the platform was recovering, the attack caused extreme load on the servers.”
The DDoS attack refers to distributed denial-of-service. It is known for overwhelming systems with multiple virus-infected servers.
Then, just recently, we reported on rumors that Bitfinex may be using token deposits by its users to vote itself in on the EOS tokens deal. This rumor was started by Weiss Ratings.
In a tweet, Weiss stated:
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