Cryptopia’s Stolen Ethereum Funds to the Tune of 30,000 ETH Moves to Mysterious Wallet

Earlier in the year, Cryptopia – a cryptocurrency exchange based in New Zealand – was a victim of multiple hacks which caused the firm to lose over $16 million worth of Ether. The event, at the time, rendered Cryptopia inactive for a while until it resumed functionality later. Now, the firm is back in the news again as some of the stolen ETH are now being moved around.

Who’s Moving The Funds?

According to an account on Twitter dedicated to tracking and posting large cryptocurrency transactions from whales in the different currencies, a little less than 31,000 ETH from the funds earlier stolen from Cryptopia was moved to an unknown wallet. This is happening just about a week after Cryptopia officially began its process of liquidation.

The tweet from WhaleAlert (@Whale_Alert) read:

“30,790 #ETH (7,740,465 USD) transferred from Cryptopia Hack to unknown wallet”

Surprisingly, according to the specifics posted on the account’s whale-alert.io, the originating address – 3fbaa73a433daa0f6c43d1c732c3f97a86f3a427 – was titled “Cryptopia Hack”. The receiving address – d96ba527be241c2c31fd66cbb0a9430702906a2a – at the time Whale Alert posted, was unknown.

However, after some time, Whale Alert went ahead to post another tweet, suggesting the address which received the stolen crypto is a Huobi wallet. The other tweet said:

“The recent Cryptopia Hack transfer very likely went to a #Huobi deposit wallet. From there it has probably been sold for other coins.”

So far, Cryptopia has not corroborated this.

Cryptopia Liquidation

About a week ago, it was officially announced that Cryptopia would be starting a liquidation process to be handled by Grant Thornton, a professional services firm based in New Zealand.

According to the announcement on the liquidator’s official website:

“The highly publicised hack of Cryptopia’s exchange in January 2019 had a severe impact on the company’s trade. Despite the efforts of management to reduce cost and return the business to profitability, it was decided the appointment of liquidators was in the best interests of customers, staff and other stakeholders.”

Also, on the 15^th of May, the official Cryptopia account Twitter posted a message advising the general public to suspend making any deposits into the troubled firm saying:

“PLEASE DO NOT SEND ANY DEPOSITS TO CRYPTOPIA.”

According to Grant Thornton, the Cryptopia management tried as much as possible to manage costs and try to return the business back to its former glory. However, after this seemed to fail, the firm realized that the only way to go was to liquidate. This, they said, was in the

“best interests of customers, staff and other stakeholders.”