Today, 5 cold wallet addresses related to bankrupt Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX actually transferred about 104 bitcoins (BTC) to currency mixer Wasabi. Previous investigations revealed that the exchange’s private key died only oddly Gerald Cotten, the founder of the company, made the whole incident even more bizarre.
(Recap:QuadrigaCX, Canada｜Exchange founder’s private key suddenly died and widow left most of 270 million assets to victimized users ）
(basic supplement:Court Supervisor Ernst & Young’s Report: Canadian Exchange QuadrigaCX’s Cold Wallet Is Empty, Frozen “Tens of Thousands of Bitcoins” Still Not Found ）
alreadyQuadrigaCX, a Canadian exchange that filed for bankruptcy in 2019, was thought to have been terminated by all, but today it was reported that more than 100 related Bitcoin assets have been found out of cold wallets after more than three years of silence. .
Ernst & Young commercial office in charge of the liquidation: The transfer has not been initiated
According to CoinDesk, before QuadrigaCX went bankrupt in 2019, its founder, Gerald Cotten, was suspected of evacuating public funds and falsifying accounts, but died accidentally on his honeymoon in India, along with the private keys to the quadriga’s assets. ‘exchange of about $200 million. .
After QuadrigaCX went bankrupt, the remaining assets were handed over to the appointed accounting firm, Ernst & Young, the fourth largest accounting firm in the world, for liquidation. However, in February 2019, Ernst & Young announced that Quadriga had “transmitted to the wrong address” when sending about 104 bitcoins. in the 5 cold wallet addresses belonging to Quadriga that can only be controlled by the founder.
Today, the bitcoins in the 5 addresses have all been transferred. According to the tracking statement of chain detective ZachXBT, these 104 bitcoins were directly transferred to the Wasabi mixed currency protocol in an attempt to exit the chain. Ernst & Young said there were no transfers of those assets today.
It appears that ~69 BTC from 1HyYM and 1JPtxS were sent to Wasabi on Dec 17, 2022
eb29aa1de112a20ad55e05e57bc9a9e3efc72c262b3fe6172fca729a2e163ff7
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) December 19, 2022
Magdalena Gronowska, bankruptcy liquidator and member of the Quadriga creditors committee, also said in response to an interview with Coindesk that Ernst & Young did not touch these bitcoins:
Thanks to the blockchain investigators for tracking the money flow, we are working hard to gather more information and hopefully we can recover the stolen funds.
Logically Ernst & Young cannot use any assets in the 5 addresses, because in the previous liquidation report the private key was lost with the death of Gerald Cotten.
Three years later, the wallet that no one should be able to open was bizarrely used: whether Gerald Cotten, who was exhumed for autopsy, was actually a fraudulent death, or someone else had the private key to Quadriga and fell into the fog before the truth came out.
