Digging Deep into the QuadrigaCX Collapse

Recently, the CEO of Bitcoin exchange QuadrigaCX died suddenly. Normally this wouldn't rate more than a paragraph in the business news pages, but all of the exchanges Bitcoins were stored on his laptop, which was encrypted with a password that only he knew.

There may be more to the story than that. BetaKit reports that there are indications that at least some of the money may be missing, not lost in what's known as a cold wallet.

As BetaKit reported last week, James Edwards, also known as Crypto Medication, an analyst behind crypto blog Zerononcense, said he reviewed the exchange’s claims based on an examination of publicly available transaction histories and determined that QuadrigaCX never lost access to its Bitcoin holdings, rather the missing sum was inaccurate. More recently, another analytics firm, Elementus Group, traced the exchange’s ether holdings, and came to the same conclusion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It's quite the story. Personally, I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a copy of that password stored somewhere. But then again, I worked at a stock exchange, where there were multiple levels of controls and security.

I should note that BetaKit was founded by my nephew, Douglas Soltys, who has turned it into the major source of news for Canada's startup tech sector.