Over 100 Bitcoin Mysteriously Moved from QuadrigaCX Cold Wallet After Three Years of Dormancy

Over 100 Bitcoin (BTC) associated with the now-defunct Canadian exchange QuadrigaCX was unexpectedly moved from the exchange's cold wallet over the past weekend.

Update as of December 21:

In an interview with CoinDesk, EY – the auditing firm responsible for QuadrigaCX's assets – confirmed awareness of the “unauthorized” transactions moving BTC from the exchange's wallet.

EY stated that it did not execute these transactions and revealed that during their investigation, they could not locate the private keys associated with these wallets.

Original Article:

A total of 104.34 BTC, valued at approximately $1.7 million, has been moved from QuadrigaCX’s wallet. Much of this amount appears to have been distributed to various other wallets. The amounts sent from each wallet match the amounts received by these wallets in 2019.

Details about the wallets have been listed by ZachXBT, a crypto investigator ranked in CoinDesk’s Top 50 Crypto Influencers of 2022, on his personal page.

Additionally, ZachXBT reported that a significant portion of the 104.34 BTC (around 69 BTC) was sent to the crypto mixer Wasabi from the wallets 1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa and 1JPtxSGoekZfLQeYAWkbhBhkr2VEDADHZB.

Notably, it remains unclear who is behind these actions, as the bankruptcy trustee for QuadrigaCX, the auditing firm Ernst & Young, confirmed they completely lost control of these Bitcoins in February 2019 after mistakenly sending the funds to QuadrigaCX’s cold wallet, rendering the company unable to access the assets.

QuadrigaCX officially went bankrupt in 2019 following the mysterious death of its founder and CEO, Gerald Cotten, an event that inspired a Netflix documentary released in 2022. At the time of its collapse, Quadriga was believed to owe thousands of customers nearly $200 million in various crypto assets, marking a significant failure for what was once Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

However, it’s not unusual for large sums of Bitcoin associated with notorious exchanges to be moved after years of dormancy.

Notably, in February 2022, the crypto community was shocked to see $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 Bitfinex hack suddenly move. In reality, this transaction was part of a U.S. government seizure following the arrest of the couple behind the hack.