Ernst & Young, one of the big four financial audit giants and court-appointed independent third-party supervisor of the legal and financial controversy-riddled Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX, released their “” which revealed vital information about the exchange’s missing cold wallets.
The audit giant identified six cold addresses, which QuadrigaCX operated in the past to [] labeled, “Identified Cold Wallets.” Furthermore, E&Y also identified three other addresses labeled “Potential Other Cold Wallets,” which were later invalidated by the auditor as being empty.
In a four-year period, i.e. from April 2014 to April 2018, the balances in the Identified Cold Wallets ranged from the minimal to zero. One exception was when the held 2,776 . The average balance at the end of every month over the aforementioned time period was 124 . The report also said that the Bitcoins in the Identified Cold Wallets were transferred out completely in April 2018.
Since then, no deposits were recorded in the Identified Wallets. An exception, however, was when worth $500,00 was “inadvertently transferred” into the sixth . However, information about the same was previously disclosed by the applicant.
The last transaction from the sixth was recorded on 3 December 2018. E&Y claimed that exchanges could have been the recipients of some of the Bitcoins in the aforementioned wallets, referring to them as “identifiable exchanges.”
E&Y report stated,
“To date, the Applicants have been unable to identify a reason why Quadriga may have stopped using the Identified Cold Wallets for deposits in April 2018, however, the Monitor (E&Y) and Management will continue to review the Quadriga database to obtain further information.”
Following the release of this report, E&Y will now look into the exchange’s hot balances to investigate the location of the missing .
Since the untimely death of its founder, Gerald Cotten, the exchange’s operations have been in limbo. In early February, the exchange filed for creditor protection, following which E&Y was appointed to oversee operations.
The only information about the location of the wallets came from a five-year-old podcast, in which Cotten stated that the private keys were stored offline in a bank, in the company’s safe deposit box. However, no concrete information about the same has surfaced.
Recently, another exchange Kraken offered a helping hand to QuadrigaCX, promising a reward of $100,000 in fiat and to anyone who provided reliable information leading to the retrieval of QuadrigaCX’s cold wallets.
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Published at Sun, 03 Mar 2019 03:41:43 +0000
