Digital exchange loses $137 million as founder takes passwords to the grave

Ready for a nightmare? Take a read through this article from arstechnica

In short...

A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers’ assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access to the offline wallet that stored the digital coins.

😳

The exchange in question is QuadrigaCX and we really hope you don't have and funds sitting on their service.

The widow of the founder has hired a 3rd party firm to try to decrypt the harddrive the offline wallet is sitting on, but I'm guessing they aren't holding out a lot of hope.

As of January 31, 2019 this message is posted on their homepage...

Message from QuadrigaCX Board of Directors January 31, 2019 Dear Customers, An application for creditor protection in accordance with the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) was filed today in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court to allow us the opportunity to address the significant financial issues that have affected our ability to serve our customers. The Court is being asked at a preliminary hearing on Tuesday February 5 to appoint a monitor, Ernst & Young Inc., as an independent third party to oversee these proceedings. For the past weeks, we have worked extensively to address our liquidity issues, which include attempting to locate and secure our very significant cryptocurrency reserves held in cold wallets, and that are required to satisfy customer cryptocurrency balances on deposit, as well as sourcing a financial institution to accept the bank drafts that are to be transferred to us. Unfortunately, these efforts have not been successful. Further updates will be issued after the hearing.

This, of course, is why having good operations policies are really important. Per Arstechnica: "it’s a good bet QuadrigaCX didn’t follow any of these best practices. It’s an equally good bet that most competing exchanges don’t either"

Yup! Be careful out there folks.