Five wallets linked to the defunct Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX, previously thought to be inaccessible, have just been discovered moving around $1.7 million worth of Bitcoin after years of inactivity.
The investigator ZachXBT alerted the cryptocurrency community in a Twitter post on Dec. 19, noting that the five wallets had transferred around 104 Bitcoin (BTC) on Dec. 17 to various wallets.
Blockchain records show that the wallets had not sent BTC since at least April 2018.
Five wallets attributed to QuadrigaCX unexpectedly moved ~104 BTC on Dec 17 for the first time in years.
1ECUQLuioJbFZAQchcZq9pggd4EwcpuANe
1J9Fqc3TicNoy1Y7tgmhQznWrP5AVLXj9R
1MhgmGaHwLAvvKVyFvy6zy9pRQFXaxwE9M
1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa
1JPtxSGoekZfLQeYAWkbhBhkr2VEDADHZB— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) December 19, 2022
QuadrigaCX, once Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in April 2019 following the December 2018 death of its founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, who was solely responsible for the private keys of the exchange wallets.
155,000 users of the exchange are owed up to $200 million in cryptocurrency at the time of their bankruptcy.
In February 2019, A report from the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) – the firm that oversees the exchange’s equity – claimed that QuadrigaCX accidentally transferred around 103 BTC on February 6, 2019 to cold wallets that only the exchange had access to. late Cotten, an almost identical amount to that of Bitcoin that has moved recently.
At the time, the firm said that it would be working with the administration to recover the cryptocurrencies from the cold wallets.
The mysterious death of the founder and CEO of QuadrigaCX, followed by the collapse of the exchange, had sparked conspiracy theories that the founder faked his own death as part of a fraudulent exit scam.
The story was the subject of a 2022 Netflix documentary.
In 2014, years before his death, Cotten said in a podcast that the best way to save private keys was to print them and store them offline in a safe deposit box, and revealed that the exchange stored its private keys offline in the company safe deposit box at a bank.
Whether the BTC move is related to EY recovery efforts is unknown. Cointelegraph reached out to EY for comment but did not immediately hear back.
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