Cryptopia liquidator returns $ 5 million to affected exchange customers

The liquidator running the New Zealand exchange Cryptopia will return to customers about $5 million stolen inhacking result.

Grant Thornton Company, acting on behalf ofexchange, published detailed information on the amount of assets to be redeemed, and also spoke about the difficulties encountered in the process of identifying the owners of crypto assets.

Thus, to date the company has received approximately10 million New Zealand dollars ($6.61 million) from the sale or conversion of Cryptopia assets. At the same time, a fee of 3.7 million New Zealand dollars ($2.45 million) was withdrawn for the services, the remaining $4.16 million will be distributed among the victims of the exchange hack.

The actual distribution process will only be implemented after some time, since the liquidator has yet to determine the true owners of the assets.

According to Grant Thornton, the exchange has more than 900,000 customers, and requires an estimate of a million transactions:

We are working on the identification of accounts of more than 900,000 active customers, many of whom owned several cryptocurrencies and made millions of transactions.

Difficulties arose due to the fact that Cryptopia pooled user funds rather than storing them in separate wallets linked to individual accounts.

While Cryptopia stored information aboutassets of clients, the coins themselves were combined (mixed) in wallets. As a centralized exchange, customer transactions took place on the exchange's internal ledger without confirmation on the blockchain.

The liquidator emphasized that Cryptopia did not check the amounts in its wallets with the customer database, thus making the process of distributing property difficult.

Let us remind you that Cryptopia was liquidated back in May. The liquidator's next report is due by May 2020, with a Supreme Court hearing scheduled for February.