It is no news that earlier this year, there was an attack on the popular crypto exchange, Cryptopia, and even though trading continued after the attack, the company was deep in debts and liquidators had to step in. According to the liquidators who have released a report about the financial situation of Cryptopia, it was revealed that the firm is in debt of more than $2.738 million US dollars to its creditors.
Grant Thornton New Zealand that was appointed to be the liquidator, made the report public on Friday 31st May, 2019. According to the report, at $1.37 million is owed 69 unsecured creditors, while the secured creditors are owed more than $912,000. Furthermore, it may interest you to know that there is a deficit of about $1.63 million. Some of the secured creditors include big companies like Coca Cola Amatil (New Zealand) and Dell NZ.
Cryptopia staff is not left out of the debts, as the company owes the staff $207,000 which is for unpaid salaries, as well as holiday pay. There is also an unsecured debt with an amount of $177,000. According to Grant Thornton, there is every probability that there could be a rise in the amount owed the unsecured creditors.
Sometime in January, there was a major hack on Cryptopia, and the result was significant losses, and according to an estimate from a blockchain data analytics company, about $16 million worth of ERC-20 tokens and Ether could have been stolen. While dealing with the hack and bank issues, the platform resumed trading activities and services, and then went into liquidation. Furthermore, the firm suspended every trading operation on the platform earlier in May, 2019, and there are no indications that they will resume trading operations any time soon on the platform.
Based on the report from the liquidators, even though the crypto exchange had resumed trading after the hacks, the volumes were not enough for the company to pay its debts, because they were already due, hence, it was decided that liquidators had to come in, and the part of liquidators stepping in was in the best interest of the stakeholders, staff, and customers. In a recent development, there was a move by Grant Thornton to file for bankruptcy protection, in order to facilitate the preservation of data owned by Cryptopia that is hosted and stored on servers owned by an Arizona-based company. According to Grant Thornton, it is still unclear how much is owed the customers because there has to be reconciliation between the platform’s crypto wallets and the balance data base of the users. However, the liquidators are seeking to retrieve the data. When the liquidation happened, Cryptopia had $691,229 in fiat currency, but also had a loan that was about $150,000. There are fixed assets what have a face value of more than $1.3 million.
At the moment, the local police are still making efforts to recover the cryptocurrency that got lost after the hack, and the company’s tax liabilities are not known.
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