This is the crypto-exchange that said only dead boss could unlock $137m in wallets
When Gerald Cotten, CEO of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, died late last year, we were told no one at his company knew how to access the offline digital wallets storing his customers’ digital dosh.
These “cold wallets,” the biz said last month, “are highly encrypted and were kept off the QuadrigaCX server for security reasons. Gerry took sole responsibility for the handling of funds for QuadrigaCX and as such no one other than him can access the coins in the cold wallets.”
No Gerry, no passwords to the wallets holding everyone’s e-moolah, in other words.
Since Cotten’s reported death, at the age of 30 while traveling in India, those left running the exchange have been keen to recover the CAN$184m (US$137m, £105m) in clients’ crypto-cash thought to be residing in the aforementioned cold storage. In February, after receiving temporary protection from creditors from a Canadian court, QuadrigaCX said, despite weeks of toiling, it had been unable to recover “our very significant cryptocurrency reserves.”
Those reserves now appear to be less significant than suggested. On Tuesday this week, Ernst & Young (EY), the financial powerhouse appointed by the courts to oversee QuadrigaCX’s fate, published its third report revealing there’s literally nothing to worry about – five of the six offline wallets in question were emptied in April 2018, about eight months before Cotten’s death.
