About seven percent of all bitcoins mined in the world are stored on Xapo servers housed in a guarded former military bunker in the Swiss mountains. The cost of such a volume of cryptocurrency is estimated at $ 10 billion, Bloomberg reports, citing sources.
“This means that in just four years (Xapo began providing custody services in 2014), the size of Xapo's deposits exceeded the amount that is in the accounts of 98 percent of about 5,670 US banks,” Bloomberg writes.
The bunker is a so-called cold storage of bitcoins - it stores the cryptocurrency offline, which minimizes the threat of theft. It takes Xapo customers about two days to get their bitcoins from such a storage, while the company verifies the identity of the client and the authenticity of his request to transfer the cryptocurrency. Xapo then manually signs the transactions with private keys located in different locations in the bunker.
In January in Rio de Janeiro, robbers attacked a currency exchange office working with bitcoins. The criminals tied up the owner and, threatening with weapons, demanded to give back the cryptocurrency. The cybercriminals took the phone from the outlet owner and stated that they want to get bitcoins, which are allegedly stored in a virtual wallet. “But our cryptocurrency is in a different place,” the man said. As a result, the criminals took with them only cash and valuables worth 31 thousand dollars.