Ernst & Young, the accountancy firm, denied moving $1.7 million in Bitcoin mistakenly transferred three years ago to inaccessible cold wallets associated with QuadrigaCX. On the 20th of December, in a tweet, ZachXBT, an on-chain researcher, flagged the movement of 104 Bitcoin, worth around $1.7 million, split across five cold wallets, and much of it to the privacy wallet Wasabi.
According to the researcher, this Bitcoin had been dormant for over three years since employees at QuadrigaCX, a collapsed Canadian crypto exchange that lost $190 million in user funds, had inadvertently sent the Bitcoin to these wallets under the auspices of Ernst & Young.
Ernst & Young is the court-appointed monitor and Trustee in Bankruptcy overseeing the unwinding of QuadrigaCX. And the accountancy firm is also responsible for retrieving stranded funds. Previously, it had been unclear whether the wallets were still active and who could have recently moved the Bitcoin. And the accountancy firm also denied any involvement in the funds’ movement.
On the 20th of December, in a document, the accountancy firm said that it worked with management and others to recover the Bitcoin transferred to these wallets, and the private keys associated with the cold wallets have not been located despite the detailed examination. According to the document, the locked Bitcoin remained within the Quadriga cold wallets until the 16th of December, earlier to the unauthorized transfers being initiated. The accountancy firm confirmed that it did not initiate the transfers.
QuadrigaCX is the same firm that abruptly shuttered in February 2019, and left millions in customer funds stranded in apparently inaccessible offline cold wallets. Gerald Cotten, the CEO of the crypto exchange, had sole responsibility for moving funds offline, but the addresses of the cold wallets were known only to him. Ernst & Young was subsequently appointed by the court to try and claw back losses on behalf of customers.
