QuadrigaCX: Where did the money go? Part II - The ShapeShift Story.
An investigation based on Money Flow Graph Analysis in Ethereum Blockchain utilizing Bloxy’s Coinpath® capabilities.
Wall Street Journal: “Bloxy also tracked Quadriga’s funds to Shapeshift.”
There are quite a lot of transfers of money to and from exchange wallets and ShapeShift non-custodial exchange. The top transfers appear quite close (in one hop) from the address:
Listed addresses made quite a lot of deposits to ShapeShift service. The top one is 0x03dce59fe82d23b57bc0da7417b2cfbc2c96f9ba .
The strange fraction amounts (as .99744) are explained by the commission, taken by ShapeShift, transferred apart from the main transfer (and filtered out from this list due to insufficient amounts).
The total amount of ETH and transactions transferred to and from Shapeshift by exchange address 0x027beefcbad782faf69fad12dee97ed894c68549 is:
The graph below shows all transfers from ShapeShift (shown above zero axes) and to ShapeShift (below zero axes) by day, and also the moving average for one week (solid line):
The spectrum distribution of total amounts in logarithmic scale shows a rather uniform pattern with a few steps:
It is clearly seen, that:
- Almost all transactions and volume are directed towards the ShapeShift change service. It means that QuadrigaCX withdrew money from the turnover using Shapeshift.
- Most transactions are done directly from the exchange wallet, which looks like a not very typical pattern for exchange users. Traders rarely may use ShapeShift as a tool.
- Most activity is located in the timeframe from March 2016 till November 2017. Very little activity found in 2018/2019 years.
Conclusion
We identified main destinations of the money using the standard publically available Bloxy.info Money flow API. Manual investigation of this problem and finding the destination wallet would take much manual work and time. In this example, it took approximately 1 minute for one address for API call.
References
[1] https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1092596193018834944
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/quadriga-creditor-protection-filing
[3] https://blog.zerononcense.com/2019/02/04/quadrigacx-chain-analysis-report-pt-1-bitcoin-wallets/
[4] Money Flow API https://bloxy.info/api_methods#money_flow
This article was composed by the data and by analytical tools from Bloxy.info BLADE. Bloxy.info web site provides a set of tools for analytics, for traders, companies and crypto enthusiasts.
The tools include BLADE, a set of APIs, dashboards and search engine. All information is available on the Bloxy website, providing accurate data, indexed directly from the blockchain live node. Bloxy mission is to make blockchain more transparent and accessible to people and businesses. Please, make a reference to the source of data when referencing this article.
