Users of Crypto.com are concerned after CEO Kris Marszalek admitted that his exchange sent 320,000 ETH, about $400 million at the time, by mistake to a public address listed at a competitor exchange.
Transaction records from Etherscan reveal that Crypto.com transferred 320,000 ETH to competitor exchange Gate.io on October 21, just one week before it published its Proof-of-Reserves documents.
Eight days later, on October 29, Gate.io issued a refund of 285,000 ETH, roughly US$450 million. Crypto.com published its own Proof-of-Reserves on November 12, just two days ago.
While the Proof of Reserves audit preparation is underway, we are sharing our cold wallet addresses for some of the top assets on our platform.
This represents only a portion of our reserves: about 53,024 BTC, 391,564 ETH, and combined with other assets for a total of ~US$ 3.0b
— Kris | Crypto.com (@kris) November 11, 2022
Marszalek also added the following in the tweet:
“Please expect a full audited Proof of Reserves from us in the next couple of weeks, confirming the full 1:1 reserve of all customer assets.”
Marszalek claimed that the transaction had been a mistake and that the funds had been accidentally sent to their competitor’s account instead of Crypto.com’s cold storage.
“It was supposed to be a move to a new cold storage address, but was sent to a whitelisted external exchange address.” Kris explained in a tweet
It was supposed to be a move to a new cold storage address, but was sent to a whitelisted external exchange address. We worked with Gate team and the funds were subsequently returned to our cold storage. New process and features were implemented to prevent this from reoccurring.
— Kris | Crypto.com (@kris) November 13, 2022
The transaction was discovered by a user after Crypto.com posted its cold wallet address online and the user searched through transactions.
The funds are sent by 0x7758e507850da48cd47df1fb5f875c23e3340c50 and received by 0x72A53cDBBcc1b9efa39c834A540550e23463AAcB both of which are funds cited by Kris in their user PoR https://t.co/im0fMvdkq5
— Conor (@jconorgrogan) November 12, 2022
Following everything that transpired on Saturday, Marszalek tweeted:
“The ETH transfers that generated so much FUD & speculation on Twitter today were made over three weeks ago, on October 21st to http://Crypto.com’s whitelisted corporate account at http://Gate.io.”
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