Ernst and Young (EY), the court-appointed monitor in Quadriga’s Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act (CCAA), has filed its third report in Nova Scotia Supreme Court.

The defunct crypto exchange was holding $250 million CAD ($190 million USD) in crypto and fiat at the time it went bust. EY has been trying to track down any recoverable funds—and it’s not finding much.

The majority of the recoverable money will likely come from Quadriga’s third-party payment processors. The monitor has written to 10 known payment processors requesting they hand over any funds they are holding on behalf of Quadriga. (Previously, EY identified nine payment processors. Now it has added one more, though it does not reveal the name.) Here is the grim news: since its last report filed on February 20, EY has only recovered an additional $5,000 CAD ($3,800 USD) from the payment processors. 

This is in addition to the $30 million CAD ($23 million USD) EY has already recovered from the two payment processors Billerfy/Costodian and 1009926 B.C. Ltd. 

More money is out there, but getting at it may be tough. As I wrote earlier, WB21 is sitting on $12 million CAD ($9 million USD), which it is refusing to relinquish. EY notes that “further relief from the court may be necessary to secure funds and records from certain of the third party processors.”

So negligent was Quadriga in its bookkeeping that it appears to have lost track of some of its money altogether. EY located a Quadriga bank account at the Canadian credit union containing $245,000 CAD ($184,000 USD). The account had been frozen since 2017.  

EY also reached out to 14 other crypto exchanges looking for accounts that may have been opened by Quadriga or its dead CEO Gerald Cotten. EY did not name any of the exchanges, but four replied. One of them was holding a small amount of crypto on behalf of Quadriga, which it has handed over to EY.

I don’t know this for sure, but it is possible the exchange that returned the funds may have been Kraken. 

[Update: I was wrong. Kraken CEO Jesse Powell says, “Nothing recovered from Kraken. So far, we have not discovered any accounts/funds believed to belong to Quadriga.”]

Two thirds of the customer funds ($180 million CAD or $136 million USD) that Quadriga held at the time of its collapse were said have been in the form of crypto located in cold, or offline, wallets that only the exchange’s dead CEO had access to. However, it is looking more and more like those funds may have never existed. 

EY identified six cold wallet addresses that Quadriga used to store bitcoin in the past. Other than the sixth wallet, there have been no deposits into the identified bitcoin cold wallets since April 2018, except for the 104 bitcoin inadvertently transferred to one of them from Quadriga’s hot wallet on February 6, 2019. 

Post April 2018, the sixth wallet appears to have been used to receive bitcoin from another crypto exchange account and subsequently transfer the bitcoin to the Quadriga hot wallet. The sixth wallet is currently empty. The last transaction from the sixth wallet was initiated on December 3, 2018, days before Cotten died.

The monitor also identified three other potential Quadriga cold wallet addresses used to store cryptocurrency, but provided no detail.

Quadriga apparently created 14 fake accounts on its own exchange for trading fake funds. Deposits into some of the accounts “may have been artificially created and subsequently used for trading” on the platform, the report said.

A few other items in the monitor’s report caught my attention.  

Quadriga’s platform data is stored in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). But because the account was in Cotten’s personal name and not the company’s, EY is seeking a court order to authorize access. Here is where that gets weird: EY notes that there is possibly another AWS account in the name of Jose Reyes, the principal of Billerfy. Why would a payment processor need access to Quadriga’s transaction data?  

Also buried in the monitor’s report are signs EY may be getting frustrated in its dealings with Robertson and her stepfather Tom Beazley. They are the only two directors left at Quadriga. A third director, Jack Martel, resigned last month.

Recall that in her second affidavit, Robertson sought the appointment of a chief restructuring officer (CRO) for Quadriga. EY states that it “continues to see some benefit” of having someone independent of Robertson and Beazley making decisions at Quadriga.

The wording is careful, but the report goes on to say that in order for EY’s investigation “to proceed appropriately, without any conflict or appearance of any conflict,” EY needs to communicate with Quadriga “in an appropriate manner and at an appropriate time.”

Finally, less than one month in, the cost of Quadriga’s CCAA procedures now sits at $410,000 CAD ($309,000 USD).