Today, 5 cold wallet addresses related to the bankrupt Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX actually transferred regarding 104 bitcoins (BTC) to the currency mixer Wasabi. Previous investigations revealed that the private key of the exchange only died strangely Gerald Cotten, the founder of the company, made the whole incident even more weird.
(Recap:QuadrigaCX, Canada｜The private key of the founder of the exchange died suddenly, and the widow left most of the 270 million assets to the victim users ）
(background supplement:Court Supervisor Ernst & Young Report: The cold wallet of the Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX is empty, and the frozen “tens of thousands of bitcoins” are still not found ）
alreadyQuadrigaCX, a Canadian exchange that declared bankruptcy in 2019, was thought to have been settled by everyone. Today, it was reported that more than 100 related Bitcoin assets were found to be out of cold wallets following more than three years of silence. transfer out.
Ernst & Young accounting firm responsible for 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 while on his honeymoon in India, along with the private keys of the exchange’s assets of approximately $200 million.
After QuadrigaCX went bankrupt, the remaining assets were handed over to the entrusted audit institution, Ernst & Young, the world’s four largest accounting firm, for liquidation. However, in February 2019, Ernst & Young announced that Quadriga had “transmitted to the wrong address” when sending regarding 104 bitcoins. into the 5 cold wallet addresses belonging to Quadriga that can only be controlled by the founder.
Today, the bitcoins in the 5 addresses were all transferred out. According to the tracking statement of the chain detective ZachXBT, these 104 bitcoins were directly transferred to the mixed currency protocol Wasabi in an attempt to get out of the chain. Ernst & Young said there were no transfers of those assets today.
It’s appears ~69 BTC from 1HyYM & 1JPtxS were sent to Wasabi on Dec 17, 2022
eb29aa1de112a20ad55e05e57bc9a9e3efc72c262b3fe6172fca729a2e163ff7
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) December 19, 2022
Magdalena Gronowska, the bankruptcy liquidator and member of the Quadriga creditors committee, also said in response to Coindesk’s interview that Ernst & Young did not touch these bitcoins:
I thank investigators on the blockchain for following the money flow, we are working hard to gather more information and hopefully we will be able to recover the stolen funds.
Logically, Ernst & Young cannot use any assets in the 5 addresses, because in the previous liquidation report, the private key has been lost with the death of Gerald Cotten.
Three years later, the wallet that no one should be able to open was used strangely. Whether Gerald Cotten, who was exhumed for an autopsy, was actually a fraudulent death, or someone else had the private key of Quadriga, and fell into the fog before the truth came out .
