A researcher has recently published a report that claims to have tracked a trail of 12 wallets to find $90 million worth of Ethereum belonging to the embattled cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX.
According to James Edwards, the CEO of cryptocurrency research platform Zerononcense, the $90 million worth of ETH belonging to the Canadian cryptocurrency exchange have been tracked down to wallets belonging to Kraken, Bitfinex, and Poloniex. The report reads:
Altogether, a cumulative 649,708 Ethereum was sent to Kraken, Bitfinex, and Poloniex directly by QuadrigaCX, which was worth a total of $100,490,150 at the time of transfer. This report does not imply that there was any nefarious intent behind the transfers or that these exchanges are in collusion with one another.
The funds are reportedly spread across 12 wallets, and it’s speculated that Quadriga’s late CEO Gerald Cotten had such large amounts on these exchanges has he was using them to store his own platform’s funds.
When Cotten’s widow filed her affidavit, she mentioned that Cotton could’ve stored funds on other cryptocurrency exchanges, corroborating Zerononcense’s research. These wallets saw their activity cease on December 8, one day before Cotten unexpectedly passed away.
Kraken, one of the crypto exchanges the wallets belong to, has already clarified that it doesn’t have any of QuadrigaCX’s funds, meaning the $90 million worth of ETH may be stored on Poloniex and/or Bitfinex. Notably, Kraken has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone with information leading to the whereabouts of the missing funds.
As CryptoGlobe covered, QuadrigaCX owes its 115,000 users $190 million, $145 million of which are in crypto and were locked away after Cotten passed away, as he was reportedly the only person with access to its cold wallets. The ordeal has cost one crypto enthusiast his $420,000 life savings.
Recently, however, court-appointed monitor Ernst & Young revealed that six cold storage wallets had minimal amounts of funds in them, with five actually being empty since April of last year.
Theories as to where the funds are abound, with some people in the crypto community believing QuadrigaCX never had its funds to begin with, and could’ve been running fractional.
Looking like my long-held theory that there isn't $190M missing because there was never actually $190M is looking more and more likely. 🤔
Their internal DBs *think* they have more $$ than they have due to combo of
– bad code & math
– fake volume
– internal/external arb#qcx pic.twitter.com/6VkfcfJJgM— Taylor Monahan (@tayvano_) March 2, 2019
Per Ernst & Young’s report, neither QuadrigaCX nor its affiliated companies were able to explain why the cold storage wallets hadn’t been used for months. George Kinsman, EY’s senior vice-president, noted that it will keep looking into the Canadian exchange’s database to clarify the situation.
