Cryptopia and the assigned liquidator, Grant Thorton, has released an update on the progress post hack but it leaves more questions than answers.
Cryptopia has officially filed for bankruptcy with a court in the Southern District of New York in an effort to preserve the data stored and hosted with an Arizona based business. This order apparently preserves all the data on the servers and the SQL database which is comprised of all the account users data. According to Grant Thorton and Cryptopia, if they had not taken this step, it would have been “impossible” to save anyone’s account holdings. If this is true why didn’t this happen with Binance who also suffered a hack recently, why didn’t they take the same action? Yes, Binance is the Bently of exchanges compared to Cryptopia who could be described as the Saturn motor vehicle provider. However, Cryptopia holds millions of currencies that belong to thousands of people. These actions feel like smoke and mirrors.
The following excerpt from the press release was the icing on the cake “we are seeking legal advice about our responsibilities in relation to the various currency holdings.” Their responsibility is to open up withdrawals and let the rightful owners of each individual coin retrieve their funds. Seeking legal advice for this could basically mean “We’re trying to see if we can keep some of your coins to cover our losses”.
The worst part about all of this is that the Arizona company that has all the users data has requested to terminate its agreement with Cryptopia and is demanding $2 million dollars. If that money isn’t coughed up, all the user’s data could be deleted by that Arizonian company. This is according to a Bloomberg report. That’s a terrifying statement that wasn’t revealed in the current release by Grant Thorton and Cryptopia. Being a Cryptopia account holder, it feels as if we are powerless. Our comments on twitter are most likely overlooked. If you are asking yourself how long will it take to get our coins back then? Here is a devastating statement from the release:
“We expect that the process of recovering data and determining how to make distributions to account holders will take some months at least. ”
Recent news revealed something even more interesting and ridiculous, Cryptopia’s co-founder Adam Clark has started a new exchange called “Assetylene”. Apparently, he stopped working on Cryptopia since February 2018 and wants users to sign up to this new exchange which doesn’t even have any info on the about page. According to some sources the site adopted TradeSatoshi’s one-click turnkey software. This exchange isn’t a custom platform and with TradeSatoshi under fire recently for some malpractices on their exchange, no one can trust such a site.
If you hold any coins or tokens on Cryptopia, share your thoughts and feelings below.