Altcoin News: Researchers Have Discovered Five Cold Wallets of the QuadrigaCX Exchange
February 15, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
Independent Internet analyst has claimed that he had established five Bitcoin addresses that belong to the QuadrigaCX exchange. He published his findings on Reddit on February 13.
The u /dekoze user’s message on Reddit lists five addresses allegedly associated with the exchange. In this case, the analyst notes that these are just a few wallets that can be associated with the site. The volume of transactions sent to addresses is approximately equal to the number of Bitcoins that were previously mistakenly sent to cold wallets to which the company does not have access.
“Notably, every address was inactive since April 2018 and the majority of their received BTC was either directly from the QCX hot wallet or a wallet 1 transfer removed from the hot wallet,” u/dekoze commented, continuing:
“With all this information this we can confirm: These 5 addresses are a portion of the QCX cold wallet addresses.”
QuadrigaCX ran into problems after the CEO of the Exchange, Gerald Cotten, died in December. He did not leave any information about the cold wallets of the exchange or how to access them. Because of this, QuadrigaCX customers may lose up to $190 million irrevocably. Since then, many theories have arisen related to events, including the fact that Quadriga became insolvent long before the death of the CEO.
“At this point, due to plausible deniability and lack of transparency, we have reached the extent of what we (non-law enforcement) can 100% know for now,” u/dekoze summarized:
“With minimal understanding of the BTC blockchain though, there are some big leads we can follow but can only speculate on.”
In late January, the Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX went offline, and a week later the court released the crypto exchange from the pursuit of creditors for 30 days.
Crypto exchange CEX.io is not affected
In our recently published article “Is Crypto Exchange QuadrigaCX an Exit Scam?” we mentioned that QuadrigaCX belongs to cryptocapital.co, which also includes Bitfinex, CEX.io, and Coinapult. Everyone has had some trouble with withdrawals lately.
The CCO of the CEX.io crypto exchange, Peter Ivanov, provided us with an official comment on the question from the article (Are Bitfinex, CEX.io, and Coinapult also affected?) stated:
1. CEX.IO does not and has never had any financial relations with QuadrigaCX. No QuadrigaCX-related incidents could have affected CEX.IO activities in the past, and they have no effect on CEX.IO now.
2. CEX.IO delivers stable deposit and withdrawal services for fiat currencies. Currently, we are working with five key financial partners that process our customers’ transfers, both deposits and withdrawals, in EUR and GBP.
3. Since we aim to deliver the highest quality of service, USD withdrawals are now temporarily unavailable. Currently, we are negotiating on possible partnerships with several banks, and we have already achieved two agreements with banks to process transfers for our users from the United States as well as Europe. Soon we will relaunch USD payment processing and will be actively working on service improvements.
Author: Marko Vidrih
