NiceHash

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  NiceHash is a cryptocurrency broker and exchange that runs an open marketplace for buyers and sellers of hashing power. On the 6th of December 2017, hackers stole roughly 4,700 Bitcoins from the platform, worth about 64 million US dollars at the time. The theft was allegedly carried out through a spear phishing attack. The people who built NiceHash, and the people who later ran it, carried their own complicated history into the story. Who founded the company? Who was in charge the day the bitcoins disappeared? And why would investigators on more than one continent spend years chasing the answer?

• 2. Two Founders From Slovenia

  ›

  Marko Kobal and Matjaž Škorjanc started NiceHash together in 2014, when both were still university students in Slovenia. Škorjanc had begun his education as a medical student before switching to computer programming. The company they built would end up based in the British Virgin Islands, while keeping working offices in Maribor, Slovenia.

  NiceHash's business centers on a marketplace where people buy and sell hashing power, the computing capacity used to mine cryptocurrency. Alongside that marketplace, the company also distributes its own software for running mining operations. Two students had built a business that depended on strangers trusting each other with real computing power and real money. That business, and the men behind it, would soon draw attention from hackers, prosecutors, and international police.

• 3. The Company Regroups

  ›

  On the 21st of December 2017, Marko Kobal resigned as NiceHash's chief executive. That same day, the company reopened its marketplace, which had been closed since the attack. More than three years later, on the 17th of February 2021, US authorities indicted the North Korean hacker group Lazarus for the theft. The indictment named a foreign hacking group in the theft. But the man still running the company carried a criminal history of his own. That history had nothing to do with Lazarus, and it predated NiceHash entirely.

• 4. The Butterfly Bot Case

  ›

  Before NiceHash, Škorjanc helped create a piece of malware called the Mariposa botnet, also known as Butterfly Bot or BFBOT. A Slovenian court sentenced him to four years and ten months in prison for his part in it. On the 5th of June 2019, US law enforcement reopened its case into the Mariposa gang's operations.

  Later in 2019, the FBI pressed new charges and issued arrest warrants against four suspects, Škorjanc among them. Germany detained him that year for eight months while the case moved forward. Both Germany and Slovenia rejected the American extradition requests, citing double jeopardy, since he had already served a sentence at home for the same case. Škorjanc was released in 2020. By the time he walked free, NiceHash was heading toward yet another change in its leadership.

• 5. A New Chief Executive

  ›

  In 2024, Škorjanc announced that Vladimir Hozjan would become NiceHash's next chief executive. Hozjan's arrival opened a new chapter in the company's leadership, written by someone whose name had not appeared anywhere else in NiceHash's story until then.