The liquidator of the Cryptopia exchange was able to recover $7.2 million of the $16 million stolen by hackers
Exchange liquidator Grant Thornton New Zealand has released a report detailing the balance sheet of recovered assets and the challenges the company faces.
Overall, from may to November, the company received $10.9 million in new revenue, including $5 million from a third-party trust Fund, $4.4 million converted from the exchange's 344 BTC, and $200,000 from the sale of assets-furniture and equipment from The cryptopia office.
However, expenses related to the ongoing liquidation process amounted to $3.7 million, including payments to first-line creditors, salaries, legal expenses and liquidator commissions. Thus there is $7 164 835 million in assets that can potentially be used to compensate users.
While the user compensation process is reported to be "well under way," the report also highlights the complexity of the operations that need to be performed to determine the amount of payments to each user.
As the company notes, it is extremely difficult to determine the balance of each asset That cryptopia customers owned, since customers did not have individual wallets, and crypto assets were instead stored in shared wallets
In addition, the exchange has not completed the verification of its client databases with cryptocurrencies actually in its wallets, leaving "time-consuming work" to find out the balance of each client.
Also a potential obstacle to possible payments was the fact that legal issues had to be resolved first. The liquidator appealed to the Supreme court of New Zealand for clarification of the legal status of crypto assets in the country.
As Grant Thornton notes, the court's decision on whether crypto assets are considered property or not will determine whether they can be managed by proxy or whether the company retains pre-emptive ownership. The next mandatory liquidator report must be submitted by may 2020. The company also plans to release an updated version of the report after a court hearing in February.
The liquidation process of cryptopia exchange was started in may and soon after the exchange filed for protection from prosecution by creditors under the bankruptcy law in the United States. According to Elementus research, Cryptopia lost $16 million as a result of the hack.