Professional services firm Grant Thornton claims that it is progressing in securing and preserving the cryptocurrencies of hacked cryptocurrency exchange Cryptopia.
In a press release published
on Aug. 21, Cryptopia’s liquidator claims to “have made good progress
towards securing and preserving Cryptopia crypto-asset holdings for the
benefit of those entitled to them.” Per the release, there are two
reasons why determining the holdings of the exchange’s clients is taking
so long.
The firm explains that customers did not have individual
wallets and their funds were pooled together, as the exchange kept
details of customer holdings in its database. As a consequence of this
design, it is purportedly impossible to determine individual ownership
using only wallet keys.
Furthermore, according to Grant Thornton,
no detailed reconciliation process between the customer holdings
database and the crypto assets held in the wallets has ever been
completed, which the company hopes would reveal individual user
holdings. The company also claims that the process is already well
underway, explaining:
“We are working to reconcile the
accounts of over 900,000 customers, many holding multiple
crypto-assets, millions of transactions and over 400 different
crypto-assets. These must be reconciled one-by-one. ”
Hacked asset recovery
Lastly,
the firm notes that it is still determining whether it can recover the
crypto assets lost during the hack which affected the exchange in
January 2019. The announcement further states that the complex situation
requires cooperation from third parties.
As Cointelegraph reported
at the end of May, Grant Thornton had released an estimation statement
of the financial state of the firm, reporting that the hacked exchange
owes a total of $4.22 million to its creditors.
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