An independent researcher has claimed to have found a group of Bitcoin addresses that he believes belong to one of the cold wallets of the now defunct Canadian crypto exchange. It’s a notable discovery given that the exchange had already claimed that it was unable to access the wallets since the death of Gerald Cotten who was the CEO.
The New Discovery Complicates The Case For QuadrigaCX
In a post published on Feb. 13 by Reddit user u/dekoze, there is a strong likely hood that the five addresses belong to QuadrigaCX and they are just a fraction of the many wallets associated to the exchange.
On Tuesday Ernst & Young (EY) in its first progress report told the Canadian court that on Feb. 6 the exchange had mistakenly transferred 103 BTC to its cold wallets which it was unable to access. EY is the firm that was appointed by the court to monitor the proceedings at QuadrigaCX.
According to the analysis by u/dekoze, the transactions sent to the identified addresses on the same date matched the amount of Bitcoins the exchange claimed to have mistakenly sent to the cold wallets.
Interestingly, the researcher adds “Notably, every address was inactive since April 2018, and the majority of their received BTC was either directly from the QCX hot wallet or a wallet 1 transfer removed from the hot wallet. With all this information this we can confirm: These five addresses are a portion of the QCX cold wallet addresses.”
He went on to list the five addresses and the number of Bitcoins they had received totaling to 104.335 BTC.
•  1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa received 36.37786282 BTC
•  1JPtxSGoekZfLQeYAWkbhBhkr2VEDADHZB received 33.19556316 BTC
•  1MhgmGaHwLAvvKVyFvy6zy9pRQFXaxwE9M received 19.54328527 BTC
•  1ECUQLuioJbFZAQchcZq9pggd4EwcpuANe received 10.34268585 BTC
•  1J9Fqc3TicNoy1Y7tgmhQznWrP5AVLXj9R received 4.87560516 BTC
To support the discovery the researcher noted that the first address had once received a small amount of BTC from the 3N8auHdN9rtmHDHqNnXK4eWhfukBAQcve1, address that was listed as a hot wallet for the crypto exchange in the court affidavit.
Also, two blockchain analysis sites OXT and Walletexplorer have “clustered” together those five addresses determining that they belong to the same entity.
