Cryptopia, a New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange, no longer exists. In January 2019, the exchange was hacked, with about $ 16 million stolen from exchange coffers.
Currently, customers have had to wait for nearly a year to repay. The reason is Cryptopia did not allocate customers with individual wallets. Instead, mixing money in a way that makes it difficult to determine the balance of individual customers.
Cryptopia’s appointed liquidator, Grant Thornton, has released a joint update on this issue. The new report, titled “Liquidators’ Second Report on the State of Affairs of Cryptopia Limited,” outlines the progress made in the past six months while providing some clear explanation of current efforts.
Grant Thornton has made progress
In the report, Grant Thornton made it clear that it does not work to identify the method behind the burglary – which means that those affected by the hack will never know how the attacker can. Access to Cryptopia wallet. However, Grant Thornton is working with both New Zealand police and international authorities to determine the source of the burglary.
Liquidators have also made progress by retrieving a customer profile database from a third-party storage company in Arizona – an important step, as this data, is needed to help regulate the lake. Client profile related to some cryptocurrency assets. Grant Thornton noted that the mediation process is currently going well, but it will take more time before they can complete the process because there are more than 900,000 active customer accounts and millions of related transactions.
In addition, Grant Thornton has made progress in determining the legal status of cryptocurrency assets held in company accounts and has scheduled a trial with the New Zealand court on February 3, 2020.
Grant Thornton also noted that they held a number of webinars with cryptocurrency developers affected by the infringement and are currently reviewing the company’s activities and work – considering how it is insolvent and whether there is any relevant law violation. If so, the liquidators will take appropriate legal action, if it benefits the creditors.
$ 7.16 million in net funds
The liquidators have recovered more than $ 5 million from trust accounts of third parties. They raised $ 202,534 by selling fixed assets and liquidated 344 BTC into about $ 4.4 million. However, they also identified more than $ 200,000 in employee incentives and 26 unsecured creditors, totaling $ 2,991 million. Additionally, Grant Thornton has charged more than $ 823,000 for its services so far.
So far, the exact amount owed to creditors and the expected repayment date is still uncertain because Grant Thornton needs to complete the wallet mediation process and resolve some outstanding legal issues before began to repatriate.
However, since November 14, 2019, Grant Thornton has had $ 7.16 million in net funds, down from $ 10.9 million since being appointed as liquidator in May, due to a variety of expenses and fees. As such, it seems less than $ 5 million will be distributed to the remaining creditors – witnessing some customers lose up to 75% of their money.
Cryptopia hack
According to a tweet from blockchain analysis firm Elementus on February 4, $ 3.2 million of tokens were stolen from New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange.
The hack, which appears to be the first major security breach of 2019, was announced by the platform on January 15. The exchange said that the hack occurred on January 14. Cryptopia initially told User that it is under unexpected maintenance, has released a number of previous updates officially reported violations.
On January 20, Elementus reported that $ 16 million worth of Ethereum and ERC20 tokens were stolen. The attack continued for two weeks after an initial breach because the exchange has yet to regain control of its wallet. Hackers stole and added 1,675 ETH ($ 175,875) from 17,000 crypto wallets. Elementus said that of the 17,000 affected wallets, 5,000 were deleted when the platform was first breached, but then reloaded.
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