When visiting the website, which provides holders of the digital currency a place to store their Bitcoins, users are told the claim process will be opened “in the next few days” so those with accounts can gain access to their balance as it was before the service interruption.
Once the claims process begins there will be 90 days for people to submit theirs by using their wallet’s URL and key.
The site said: “After 90 days, if no other claim has been received for the same url, your Instawallet balance under 50 BTC will be refunded. If several claims have been filed for the same url, we will process those claims on a case by case basis, under the presumption that the claim we received first belongs to the legitimate balance holder.”
Instawallet said claims for balances that hold more than 50 BTC will be dealt with on a “case by case and best efforts basis”.
In a separate development, security experts Kaspersky Labs have reported that a trojan, that can hijack a computer and force it to mine for Bitcoins, was spreading using Skype.
A message is being sent in various languages which translates to “this is my favourite picture of you”.
Dmitry Bestuzhev, of Kaspersky Labs, wrote in a blog post the majority of victims were based in Russia, Poland, Costa Rica, Spain, Germany and Ukraine.
HumanIPO reported last week Bitcoins had soared in value since the start of the year. One Bitcoin was worth just US$13.50 in January. According to Bitcoin exchange website, at the time of writing one Bitcoin is worth around US$188.
