In 2019, Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX went bankrupt when Gerald Cotten, one of the founders, mysteriously passed away. Cotten was the only one with access to the private keys of the wallets, preventing customers’ cryptocurrencies from being distributed to their rightful owners. Now more than 100 bitcoins (BTC) have been mysteriously moved.
‘Caught’ bitcoins disappeared
Roughly 104 bitcoins will be out on December 17 cold storage and have been sent to various other wallets. At the time of the transaction, the tokens were worth approximately $470,000 Canadian, or approximately $325,000.
Five wallets attributed to QuadrigaCX unexpectedly moved ~104 BTC on Dec 17 for the first time in years.
1ECUQLuioJbFZAQchcZq9pggd4EwcpuANe
1J9Fqc3TicNoy1Y7tgmhQznWrP5AVLXj9R
1MhgmGaHwLAvvKVyFvy6zy9pRQFXaxwE9M
1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa
1JPtxSGoekZfLQeYAWkbhBhkr2VEDADHZB— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) December 19, 2022
CoinDesk spoke with Magdalena Gronowska of renowned accountancy firm Ernst & Young. She has been appointed as a trustee in the bankrupt company and is also on the board that the creditors have set up. According to her, the bitcoins were not sent by Ernst & Young, but it is unclear who did this.
So it seems to be a hack. It is possible that this is not an internal problem with the creditors’ committee, but that the thieves had access to the wallets before because they had the private keys. Ernst & Young is one of the four largest bookkeepers in the world and has an excellent reputation.
Below you will find the on-chain data. All five affected wallets have previously been confirmed to be from the bankrupt exchange.
Strange situations at QuadrigaCX
QuadrigaCX would owe more than $ 190 million to customers, but bankruptcy has been going on for some time due to lack of access to these wallets. From time to time, remarkable details pass by, for example, the Decentralized Finance platform Wonderland, which is connected to QuadrigaCX, has been shut down.
Michael Patryn, a co-founder of this project, was also one of the co-founders of QuadrigaCX. Not long after Wonderland was shut down, it emerged that one of the exchange’s co-founders may have laundered millions worth of ETH tokens through the crypto mixer Tornado Cash early this year. In 2021, Netflix announced that the mysterious death of QuadrigaCZ co-founder Gerald Cotten will be filmed.