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 CryptoX 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.
