When the CEO of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange died, the password for his computer “died” with him. As a result, $190 million in deposit were lost.
On 31 January, QuadrigaCX filed an application for creditor protection with the supreme court of Nova Scotia, after months of transaction delays.The company hired Ernst & Young as an independent third party to oversee the whole process that was about to unfold.
The exchange is now “offline” and reportedly has sent all of its remaining cryptocurrencies to its audit “partner”, E&Y. The news comes from an official statement made by the Big 4 audit firm.
Following some preliminary testing performance, Quadriga transferred all the crypto it had left to E&Y on February 14th. What this transfer included were 33 Bitcoin Cash, 952 Ethereum, 51 Bitcoins and some Litecoins (around 800). The value of the transfer is roughly $400,000.
While Quadriga and E&Y await court orders and decisions, all of the transferred assets will be kept under E&Y’s “watch” in a cold storage.
For the fundings of the proceedings, the Canadian exchange has three sources of funds: some amounts provided by third-party stakeholders (payment processors), $4.4 million in bank drafts from a prominent law company and around $19 million in bank drafts, which were processed by Costodian Inc., a payment operator.
As Leaprate recently reported about Quadriga and its former CEO:
We may never know the truth behind these bizarre events, but we do know that E&Y has confiscated a number of Cotten’s electronic devices, including four cell phones, four laptops, and three fully encrypted USB keys. Can these devices possibly reveal another trail of mysterious goings on behind the scenes?