It’s been close to five weeks since Canadian-based cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX suspended operations and filed for creditor protection from a Canadian court following the sudden death of its founder and CEO Gerald Cotton back in December 2018. Purportedly, only Cotton had access to the company’s funds including those held in cold storage on behalf of its customers.
It is estimated that more than $190 million of both customer and creditor money is inaccessible and neither can it be located. However, several are questioning the circumstances in which the CEO died as well as the unfortunate coincidental situation in which his death puts the whole company.
According to the company staff and Cotton’s widow, only Cotton had access to the private keys for the cold storage wallets. However, the circumstances surrounding his death have cast a shadow of doubt on the masses leading to more investigations on the death of the founder. Five weeks later and still no clear answers have been found and users are not anywhere close to getting compensated for their funds.
Following this development, leading American digital assets exchange Kraken has announced a bounty to incentivize the public to provide information that will likely lead to solving this mystery.
“Kraken is giving up to $100,000 USD (fiat or crypto) as a reward for the tip(s) that best lead to the discovery of the missing $190 million US dollars,” the announcement reads on Kraken’s official website.
This is not the first time that Kraken is getting involved in another exchange’s quagmire as it has done so in the previous scandal affecting Mt. Gox back in 2014. According to Kraken, it plays a benevolent role in the benefit of the cryptocurrency industry.
“Since 2014 we have invested significant resources and lent our crypto expertise to the Mt. Gox trustee and investigators, supporting the return of as much client funds as possible and as soon as possible. Events like this impact the entire industry, which is why we want to get involved if there’s a way we can help.”
So far the court has assigned the independent audit firm Ernst & Young (EY) to audit the financial records and ascertain that indeed the story being peddled by QuadrigaCX is true.
According to the Kraken announcement, any tip(s) that is presented by the public will be forwarded to law enforcement and the tipper rewarded in proportionate terms to the utility of the information presented.
The announcement post also includes a couple of podcast episodes that help any interested party to get up to speed on the QuadrigaCX case so far offering a starting point for any bounty hunters.
