$250M Gone After Quadriga CEO Declared Dead

Investor Confidence In Cryptocurrency Dissipated Following The Quadriga Scandal

Quadriga founder's widow alleges $250M in assets locked by passwords that Gerald Cotten took to grave

Is Quadriga A Scam? “Cold wallets” is crypto lingo for virtual storage where companies often hold the majority of their funds. Because they’re held offline, cold wallets are deemed more secure than so-called hot wallets, which are maintained on servers and generally handle day-to-day transactions, much like the cash sitting at a bank teller’s desk.

Instead, the company appears to have been transferring money from its hot wallets to other crypto exchanges, Galka said.

The company currently has only $375,000 in cash and owes to more than 100,000 customers a total of approximately $250 million, $180 million of which is in cryptocurrency, according to court documents.

When Galka analyzed Quadriga’s history of transactions in Ethereum, he found no evidence of cold wallets holding millions.

There are about 60 million accounts on the Ethereum blockchain and only around 20 that hold the balance that Quadriga claims to have. But none of them seem to belong to the exchange, Galka said.

“We have looked at every single address on the blockchain that Quadriga transacted with — it’s hundreds of thousands of addresses — and, in our opinion, none of them even remotely fits the profile of a cold wallet.”

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