Cryptopia Liquidator Determining Pooled Wallet Crypto Ownership

Professional services firm Grant Thornton claims that it has made good progress in securing and preserving the cryptocurrencies of hacked exchange Cryptopia.

In a news release published on Aug. 21, Cryptopia’s liquidator said there were two reasons why it had taken so long to determine what the exchange’s customers had held.

Grant Thornton explained that some customers did not have individual wallets and their funds were pooled together, as Cryptopia kept details of customer holdings in its database. As a consequence of this, the firm said it is impossible to determine individual ownership by relying on wallet keys.

The liquidator added that 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 will reveal individual user holdings. The company also claims this process is now 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, Grant Thornton said it is still determining whether it can recover the crypto assets lost during the hack which affected the exchange in January 2019 — warning the complex situation requires cooperation from third parties. 

As Cointelegraph reported, Grant Thornton released an estimation of Cryptopia’s financial state at the end of May, which revealed that the embattled exchange owed $4.22 million to its creditors.