According to a letter sent by accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY), ex-users of the now-defunct Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX will get around 13% of their total claims. The exchange is indebted to 17,648 different creditors for a total of CAD $303.1 million ($222.3 million), including Canada Post and the Canada Revenue Agency. After deducting the amount of the levy that must be paid to the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, the distribution to creditors will be equal to 13.094156% of their valid claim. Notably, there are 28 claims with values ranging from CAD $500,000 to CAD $999,999 and 15 claims totaling over CAD $1 million. Amounts owing to the remaining creditors range from CAD $0 to CAD $10,000.
According to EY, the interim dividend covers around 87.0% of the assets that the trustee presently holds, with the remaining monies set aside for future payments for the bankruptcy administration. At a later time, there will be a final distribution.
Most customers had bitcoin holdings at the time of the company’s demise in 2019, which were converted into their monetary worth as of that day, April 15. Users will get CAD $6,739.08 ($7,122.9) per coin for their Bitcoin claims, compared to CAD $223.45 ($299.45) for their Ethereum claims.
Following Gerald Cotten’s mysterious death in India, QuadrigaCX filed for bankruptcy protection. Since Cotten was the only one with access to the exchange’s private keys, users’ money was no longer accessible. QuadrigaCX was eventually determined by the Ontario Securities Commission to have been a fraudulent Ponzi scheme. The case attracted a lot of interest and became the focus of a well-liked Netflix documentary in 2022.
Customers have received a portion of their money back, however there are still substantial monies missing. Only $34.3 million in bitcoin have been collected from the estate thus far. According to cryptocurrency monitoring company Chainalysis, the payments were either never received or vanished soon in 2019. The precise whereabouts of the client monies and how QuadrigaCX used the funds are still unknown.
