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There’s both good and bad news for cryptocurrency investors who lost around $190 million from Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX.
Earlier in the month, it was reported that $190 million in customer funds consisting of both cryptocurrency and regular money had disappeared from QuadrigaCX following the alleged death of its founder Gerald Cotten of Crohn’s disease while in India.
The company claimed that Cotten was the only person who had access to the exchange’s “cold storage” wallets, meaning that they had no way of accessing the funds.
One initial report suggested that this was untrue and the company had transferred Litecoin after the death of Cotten, but worse still, it also transferred bitcoin.
In a Feb. 12 update from Ernst & Young Inc., appointed by a Canadian court to deal with the matter, the exchange is claimed to have “inadvertently” transferred 103 Bitcoins on Feb. 6 to cold wallets protected by the allegedly lost access keys held by Cotten. Notably, that’s after court proceedings had begun and the company ceased trading. The company had previously claimed it had no access to any wallets at all.
There’s also further evidence of the cold storage wallets being accessed immediately after Cotten’s death. “Several outgoing transactions have been detected after Cotton’s death, which took place on Dec. 9, 2018,” U.Today reported. “Obviously, that doesn’t fit the narrative.”
The good news is that it’s possible that keys to the lost cryptocurrency could be found.
A report Saturday claimed that Cotten may have stored the private keys on paper in a safety deposit box. The claim has its basis in an interview on the “True Bromance Podcast” in February 2014, when Cotten warned of the danger of losing keys to cold storage wallet systems and losing access to the assets stored on them.
“Even the U.S. government, with the biggest computers in the world, could not retrieve those coins if you’ve lost the private key. It’s impossible to retrieve those,” Cotten said at the time. He went on to say that he stored the keys in a safety deposit box belonging to QuadrigaCX. Where the safety deposit box is, however, is the mystery at hand.
It may amount to nothing, but as the chances of QuadrigaCX customers ever having their funds returned seemed to be slipping away, it’s a possibility that at least may provide a glimmer of hope.
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