There is an intriguing development in the ongoing BTC-e debacle. Ever since the company’s domain was seized, there have been rumors it would relaunch under a different name. It appears the new name is Wex, and its domain is Wex.nz. A lot of people will be looking for ways to get their remaining money back from the company as quickly as possible.
BTC-e Becomes Wex and Will Resume Trading
Ever since things started to unravel for the BTC-e exchange, there has been a lot of confusion. US authorities now control the company’s original domain name. The company itself only controls a portion of user funds, whereas the rest is outside their control. This means all BTC-e users who had a balance at the time of the disappearance have lost access to their money, which will eventually be repaid by the team.
A week or two ago, customers could suddenly access a mirror site of BTC-e to either request a withdrawal of their money or update their details. However, there were a few caveats as far as this activity was concerned. First of all, US users could not access their accounts whatsoever, which immediately created a lot of friction. Secondly, users who requested withdrawals effectively waived the right to claim their missing funds. It is unclear how many people did so, though.
Today, it seems the BTC-e team is ready to put most of their misery behind them. The company has relaunched under a new name as of today, and it is expected that services will resume shortly. The new enterprise is known as Wex and uses a New Zealand domain name. It is something most users will get accustomed to pretty quickly. The site might not be ready for prime time, though, as the host server was returning a 524 error at the time of writing.
The goal was to make Wex different from BTC-e. The new exchange platform aims to remain unrelated to BTC-e, although it is quite difficult to forget this association. All user accounts should have been migrated successfully. Furthermore, the company plans to be fully compliant with Know Your Customer and anti-money laundering procedures moving forward. It will be interesting to see how Wex fares in this regard, as it will undoubtedly be scrutinized by government officials for the foreseeable future.
The current plan involves operating Wex in ‘test mode” for the next week or so. All migrated users will receive bonus cryptocurrency tokens to transfer balances as they see fit. It remains unknown how long the company will take to refund existing users, though. With a significant cut to all user balances, there is a lot of money waiting to be paid back. Although the company always claimed this would be done “as quickly as possible,” it remains to be seen how things play out.
Wex is still in the process of restructuring its assets and will need to undergo an audit before it can launch trading services. Whether or not the same cryptocurrency and associated fiat currency markets will be supported remains to be seen. Regardless, it is an important first step by the company. We can only hope affected users will get their money back soon so this incident can be put behind us once and for all.
