QuadrigaCX customers’ worst fears have come to pass. The Canadian exchange is officially insolvent, and all the crypto is gone—well, most of it anyway.

On January 31, after filing for creditor protection, Jennifer Robertson, the widow of the exchange’s now-deceased CEO Gerald Cotten, filed an affidavit with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia. As it turns out, Cotten was the only person who held the keys to the exchange’s cold wallets—encrypted wallets where cryptocurrency is kept offline. When he died in December, all that crypto became inaccessible.

According to the affidavit, QuadrigaCX owes 115,000 customers some $250 million CAD ($190 million USD) in both crypto and fiat. Roughly $192 million CAD ($147 million USD) were in crypto assets, most of it in the cold wallets.

In addition to the lost crypto, $30 million CAD is currently held by payment processor Billerfy. Three other third-party payment processors are holding a combined $565,000 CAD. And another $9.2 million USD is stuck inside WB21—a money transfer service that, surprise, surprise, is being sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraud.

But here is where things get strange. Two weeks before he died, Cotten signed a will leaving $100,000 CAD for his two dogs, according to the Globe and Mail (archive.)

I’m not insinuating any foul play here, but let’s go over what we have: Cotten and Robertson supposedly got married two months before his death. Cotten writes up a will to make sure his dogs are taken care of and Robertson takes ownership of 43% of the shares of Quadriga Fintech Solutions, the parent company of QuadrigaCX, should anything awful happen to him. Once that’s all said and done, something awful happens. Cotten goes off to India to help needy children (so nice of him) and dies.

A month later, Robertson posts an announcement on the exchange’s website telling everyone the company’s CEO is dead. He was a kind, honest, upstanding, guy…after all, he sponsored an orphanage. And then later: Oh, and by the way, all the money is gone, because only Gerald knows where he put it.

[Update: A new twist to this plot may be developing. One Reddit user claims to have found the QuadrigaCX litecoin cold wallet addresses—and the funds appear to be on the move.] 

Elsewhere in the news, Canadian social media startup Kik plans to fight an expected SEC enforcement action over an initial coin offering (ICO). (Read my coverage here.) Kik raised $100 million in 2017 by selling its kin token. In a response to a Wells notice from the SEC, Kik argues that its token is a currency, therefore, it cannot be a security, and besides, the company never marketed kin as an investment anyway.

You could almost go along with that, as long as you completely ignored this 2017 Youtube video of Kik’s CEO Ted Livingston telling everyone how rich they could become if they owned kin. “We’re gonna put [kin] inside Kik and it will become super valuable on day one, we think.” Oops! (Read the full coverage in The Block.)

Two “professional hacking groups” are behind the majority of publicly reported hacks of crypto exchanges and other cryptocurrency organizations, according to a crypto crime report published by blockchain data analytics firm Chainalysis. The two nefarious groups so far have raked in $1 billion of hacking revenues for themselves. Of course, even thieves don’t keep their holdings in bitcoin. They converted everything to fiat.

If you thought SingularDTV was a dreadful name, the blockchain entertainment company has come up with something even more bad. SingularDTV has changed its name to Breaker. The company has a new logo, too—a circle comprised of small lines swirling inward meant to represent the “the hive mind,” a type of groupthink that decentralized projects like to associate themselves with.

Breaker owns Breaker Magazine, which changed its name to BreakerMag to avoid confusion. To go along with the new branding, Breaker (we’re talking about SinglarDTV now) also released a cringe-worthy video that starts with a man gyrating his hips and saying, “It’s like this,” and then devolves into a woman ripping a pink beauty mask off her face. As if the name change wasn’t awkward enough.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at International Computer Science Institute, gave a talk at Enigma, a USENIX conference, called “Cryptocurrency: Burn it with Fire!,” where he argued the entire cryptocurrency and blockchain space is effectively one big fraud. Here are the slides to the presentation. The video is not up yet, but Weaver gave a similar talk in April 2018. (It’s funny, watch it.)

For a brief period, tether (USDT), the stablecoin associated with the crypto exchange Bitfinex, rose to become the fourth largest crypto by market cap at $2 billion. It has dropped back down to sixth place now, but who knows, maybe it will rise up again. (Read my tether timeline to learn why tether is so important to crypto markets.)

Banking giant JP Morgan says bitcoin is now worth less than the cost to mine it. “The drop in Bitcoin prices from around $6,500 throughout much of October to below $4,000 now has increasingly pushed margins further and further negative for just about every region except low-cost Chinese miners,” the bank’s analysts said. (Bloomberg)

Despite all the hype, decentralized exchanges (DEX) are not attracting much interest. According to a report in Diar, DEX volume is at an all-time low—something that’s unlikely to change, mainly due to poor usability issues. Another reason to avoid DEXs:  anyone can list any token they like—even if it’s not a legitimate one.

Binance has come up with yet another harebrained business scheme. The Malta-based crypto exchange now allows customers to buy crypto using their credit cards. I can’t see this working out too well. Banks generally distance themselves from all things crypto, and many won’t allow you to put crypto on credit cards. And even if they do, weird things happen. US-based crypto exchange Coinbase no longer accepts credit cards, but when it did, Visa actually overcharged buyers—though, it did eventually issue refunds.

An Italian bankruptcy court found Francisco Firano (aka “Francisco the Bomber”) personally liable for $170 million in losses related to the BitGrail hack in April 2018. (Last year, I wrote a story about the hack for Bitcoin Magazine.) The BitGrail Victims Group posted scans of the court documents along with an explanation of the court’s decision on Medium.

In a big win for nocoiners, David Gerard, author of “Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain,” wrote a op-ed for The Block titled “The Buttcoin Standard: the problem with Bitcoin,” where he basically takes apart bitcoin and criticizes the horrendous energy waste of proof of work. Gerard’s article was solid. But just as you might expect, bitcoiners objected en masse, and even attacked The Block cofounder Mike Dudas.

Most of the criticisms were attempts to discredit the author and consisted of vague comments, such as “[Gerard’s] thought process is fundamentally broken at the protocol level,” “I was hoping for a more astute criticism,” and “terrible journalism!”

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, who used to go around comparing bitcoin to digital gold, admits he sold all his bitcoin at its peak. “When it shot up high, I said I don’t want to be one of those people who watches and watches it and cares about the number. I don’t want that kind of care in my life,” he said at the Nordic Business Forum. “Part of my happiness is not to have worries, so I sold it all and just got rid of it.” (Satoshi Times)

And finally, the police department in Lawrence, Kansas has been getting reports of bad actors calling people up at random to demand bitcoin.