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Romania’s Only Bitcoin Exchange Shuts Down Due To Disgruntled Programmer

Romanian Bitcoin Exchange, BTCXchange.ro freezes operations after a disgruntled employee quits and runs off with the platforms Back-End code.

BTCXchange

Statement on BTCXchange Website

On December 16, Romanian bitcoin exchange, BTCXchange.ro, urged all of its users to withdraw bitcoin and fiat from the site. The explanation offered was simply left at “security reasons”. A similar message was repeated the following day, only adding that they did not have access to the servers the site was running from.

The country’s only bitcoin exchange’s trading volume fell from its usual 50 bitcoins to 3 on the announcement and now sits at 0, according to BNC Data. The business allowed users to trade the Romanian leu for bitcoin in an environment similar to established exchanges like Coinbase or BitStamp. On a thread announcing the temporary closure of the exchange one former user said, “It was a great exchange. The engine worked perfectly, and everything was nice. Too bad.”

Despite the security concerns, several people in the Romanian section of Bitcointalk.org have posted they have been able to withdraw their funds without any problems.

A few days after the second announcement the exchange announced the problem had still not been resolved and the issue was their main programmer who refused to give up the code he took from the site.

“Today, December 19th, 2014, after many discussions, we have to resort to legal institutions even if this choice is not a very fast one. Therefore, until regaining access, the BTCXchange and BTCXpay services will not be available.

Seeing that both customer funds and business activity are affected, BTCXchange Operators have asked the authorities to intervene swiftly & set up a committee of independent experts who will determine the potential abuses of our former colleague, Ivan Lucian Aron (also known as Nophinity or Nopex).

The requests are as follows:

    • Users and passwords delivery at all levels;
    • Source codes delivery, property of BTCXchange Ltd.;
    • Determining user accounts changes and observing prejudices.”

The disgruntled employee, Aron, says he quit and took the back-end code of the website with him. In several forum posts, he maintains he had not been paid for months for his time or the source code he built. He concludes the code does not belong to the exchange since they have not paid him for it.

Aron, as the sole developer, built the exchange from the ground up meaning with the departure of him and his code, the site is left inoperable. Local politician and CEO of BTCXchange, Horea Vuscan, has been left to manually verifying costumer’s withdraws through the server’s control panel.

Vuscan estimates they will be able to get the code back from Aron and return to normal operations towards the end of January 2015, but the current state of the legal proceedings and exchange is unclear. BNC News has contacted Aron and Vuscan about this matter and we have not receive a reply by the time of press. Updates will be published here if we receive further information.

While this may eliminate Romanians’ ability to trade their nation currency on an exchange for bitcoin, it will likely have little affect on their ability to buy bitcoin. ZebraPay added bitcoin to their sales terminals in October, enabling 800 atms around the country to sell bitcoin. The country has two bitcoin atms and a bustling Over The Counter (OTC) market as well.

This disruption comes just as the company’s merchant payment service signed its first major deal. In early December, Netopia mobilPay, a Romanian merchant payment processor, partnered with BTCXchange’s payment service, BTCXpay and European bitcoin payment processor, Coinzone to enable over 6,000 merchants to accept bitcoin. Netopia says their merchants are unaffected by the recent troubles at the exchange, since their other partner Coinzone has taken on the duty of servicing the merchants BTCXpay which no longer can.


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