The digital-asset exchange Quadriga CX has $200 million issue unanswered,caused due to the passwords only known to its recently passed away CEO,Gerald Cotten.
Gerald Cotten,30, who died on December 9 in India from complications of Crohn’s disease thus made the access to Quadriga CX’s digital “wallets” an application that stores the keys to send and receive cryptocurrencies appears to have been lost.
Virtual currency exchanges suffered at least five major attacks last year made him always conscious about security, the laptop, email addresses and messaging system he used to run the 5-year-old business were encrypted, according to an affidavit from his widow, Jennifer Robertson. He took sole responsibility for the handling of funds and coins and the banking and accounting side of the business and, to avoid being hacked, moved the “majority” of digital coins into cold storage.
Now the firm cant retrieve $145 million (C$190 million) in Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ether and other digital tokens held for its customers, according to court documents filed January 31 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“After Gerry’s death, Quadriga’s inventory of cryptocurrency has become unavailable and some of it may be lost,” Robertson said. The company’s access to currency has been “severely compromised” and the firm has been unable to negotiate bank drafts provided by different payment processors.
“For the past weeks, we have worked extensively to address our liquidity issues, which include attempting to locate and secure our very significant cryptocurrency reserves held in cold wallets, and that are required to satisfy customer cryptocurrency balances on deposit, as well as sourcing a financial institution to accept the bank drafts that are to be transferred to us,” the firm said. “Unfortunately, these efforts have not been successful.”The firm said in Nova Scotia court.
There also aroused some speculations about whether the whole episode is created in rediff forums,as these type of cases are common in crypto business entities.
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