The QuadrigaCX story has just kept getting wilder. Earlier this month the crypto world was hit with one of its craziest news stories in quite some time (which is saying a lot). It began when popular Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX claimed that it had lost access to around $140 million worth of its users' cryptocurrency because its CEO, Gerald Cotten, had unexpectedly died in December. He was the only one who knew the passcodes to access those wallets, the company said in court.
Soon after that, customers started having trouble making withdrawals from the exchange. This, combined with the fact that it took nearly a month before the company announced its CEO's death, began to fuel speculation online that perhaps Cotten hadn't actually perished while traveling in India, as had been reported. CoinDesk found a death certificate, but this speculation persists, probably due to the growing cloud of suspicion now shadowing the company.
Shortly after Cotten's death certificate surfaced, it was revealed that Quadriga had accidentally sent an additional sum worth around $400,000 to a wallet it cannot access.
The plot gets even stranger if you start looking into the personal lives of Quadriga's executives, at least one of whom may not actually be who he says he is. Independent journalist Amy Castor has created a helpful timeline of all this—which dates all the way back to 2004. That's not a typo.
Blockchain security: We're learning the hard way. Last month's 51% attack on Ethereum Classic, the first one against a top-20 cryptocurrency, was a wakeup call. Blockchain hackers are getting better, and they're going after high profile targets.
Before last year 51% attacks, in which an an attacker is able to gain more than half of a network's mining power and use it to double-spend cryptocurrency, were mostly theoretical. But hackers appear to have made off with more than a million dollars worth of Ethereum Classic—and it was just the latest in a series of such attacks against several different coins in recent months. Slumping coin prices have played a role—as coin prices drop, miners turn off their machines and leave blockchain networks with less protection. Meanwhile, marketplaces have popped up offering mining power for rent. Put the two together and you've got a recipe for bad actors to break blockchains.
Blockchain security doesn't end with protecting against 51 percent attacks and others that focus on the system's consensus mechanism, though. Smart contract security issues present a whole new can of worms. Read all about it in my new piece.
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