Cryptopia’s Liquidator Retrieves $5 Mln, Users to Wait Longer than Expected

The allocated liquidator for Cryptopia, the collapsed New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange, has managed to recover around NZ$7.2 Mln (approx. $5 Mln) on balance since it was attacked by anonymous hackers for feasibly $18 Mln early this year. The exchange went into liquidation back in May after facing a gigantic attack by deadly unknown hackers in January.

Hacker Takes Advantage of Weak Security

The liquidator, accounting company Grant Thornton, officially issued a report on December 11, 2019, describing the breakdown and analysis of the currently recovered assets and some of the hurdles it sees in recovering some of the clients virtual assets.

Largely, the company retrieved NZ$10.9 Mln ($7.2 Mln) in fresh receipts from the month of May to Nov that includes NZ$5 Mln from a third-party trust fund, NZ$4.4 Mln changed from Cryptopia’s own 344BTC and NZ$200k from the sale of tangible property and assets like furniture, computers and equipment from the exchange’s workplace.

Nevertheless, outlays ascending from the underway liquidation development aggregate to about NZ$3.7 Mln which includes supplies to privileged creditors, wages, authorized tariffs as well as liquidators payments. This automatically secures more than NZ$7,164k in holdings which can possibly be repaid or compensated to the victims.

More Time is Needed to Complete the Task

The process is still continuing well and it looks like it will take more time to reach its fruition. Also, the report further gives a clear clarification of the time-consuming process required to properly ascertain every user’s assets.

So far, according to the liquidators, it is still very hard to determine and tell how much exactly was stolen or how much the users held on the exchange in question, because of two main reasons, one being that the users never owned individual wallets, and the second one being that the cryptocurrencies were put in general crypto-wallets.

Furthermore, Cryptopia didn’t complete settlement of its user databases with the cryptocurrencies pooled in its wallets, hence creating a huge job to determine every client’s assets holdings. Grant Thornton has also tried to seek legal status of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the country by appealing to NZ’s High Court.