Beginning the first part of its liquidation, Bankrupt New Zealand-based crypto exchange Cryptopia has returned around $225 million worth of cryptocurrencies to their account holders. Over the past 48 hours, the distribution—through liquidators—cover more than 10,000 Bitcoin and Dogechain users.
The NZ Herald states that since the establishment of Cryptopia’s claims system four years ago, Grant Thornton, the public accountancy company handling the bankruptcy case, liquidators have been working tirelessly. This corresponds with the 2020 Justice David Gendall decision, which laid the foundation for the attempts at payback.
So far, the total sum dispersed included crypto money worth more than NZ$400 million ($225 million). Still, this is only starting point. About 960,000 people participated in the exchange; many still qualified for reimbursement. Grant Thornton added, “this complex process also involved rebuilding the hacked bitcoin exchange and reconciling millions of transactions from nearly 960,000 users.”
For those who missed the first claims process, the company has also indicated hints of a second round of payouts whereby they may recover up to 100% of assets from “unclaimed holdings.” Account holders should register on the claims site before the soft cut-off date; more distributions for the new year are expected.
Following a large hack that resulted in a loss of about $16 million in cryptocurrency holdings, Cryptopia collapsed in 2019. At first, liquidators calculated the exchange due creditors to be about $4.2 million.
