Bitgrail

BitGrail was a small Italian cryptocurrency exchange that became infamous in February 2018, when its founder, Francesco Firano, announced that roughly 17 million Nano tokens (then known as RaiBlocks) had disappeared from the platform, worth an estimated 170 million dollars at the time.

BitGrail had carried an outsized share of Nano's trading volume, so the loss hit the coin's price and community hard. In the months before the announcement, users had already spotted red flags: forced identity verification, sudden freezes on withdrawals of several tokens, and rumors the exchange was heading toward an exit scam. When Firano finally disclosed the shortfall, he asked Nano's core developers to fork the network's ledger and effectively reissue the missing coins, a request the developers refused because it contradicted blockchain immutability, and because their own review found no fault in the Nano protocol itself.

BitGrail filed for bankruptcy weeks later. A court-appointed investigation subsequently found that most of the missing Nano had actually left the exchange gradually over the second half of 2017, not in a single breach, and in 2019 an Italian bankruptcy court ruled Firano personally liable for the losses and ordered seizure of his assets. Criminal fraud and money-laundering charges followed. Victims were eventually promised partial repayment, but at a loss of roughly 90 percent of their original holdings.

The case remains one of crypto's most cited exchange scam or gross-mismanagement disputes, still referenced on REKT lists of major exchange collapses, and a lasting warning about the risks of leaving funds on centralized platforms with weak security and opaque operations.