this address's ancestry traces 3 degrees to the earliest coins
QuadrigaCX was a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed in early 2019 after the reported death of founder Gerald Cotten, who was said to be the sole holder of the exchange's private keys. Court-appointed monitor Ernst & Young identified six cold wallets that had been substantially unused since April 2018 and did not hold the missing customer assets. Five bitcoin addresses were separately tied to the exchange by public blockchain analysis in February 2019, and those addresses saw renewed activity in December 2022. It is treated as a terminal hub in the transaction graph.
What is and is not established. These five addresses are community and analyst attributions, not court-confirmed: CoinDesk's February 2019 report credits a Reddit user (Decoze) plus researchers at WalletExplorer and OXT working from co-spend clustering. The same five appear again in CoinDesk's December 2022 follow-up with no attribution stated, so the two articles are not fully independent. Ernst & Young's public monitor reports describe six cold wallets but, per press summaries I fetched, did not publish the address strings themselves - so I could not tie these five to the EY set. I verified 1HyYMMCdCcHnfjwMW2jE4cv9qVkVDFUzVa exists on-chain with 1,254 funding transactions and roughly 13,317 BTC of lifetime inflow, fully spent. The broader claim in circulation that ~31 addresses belong to Quadriga comes from a single researcher's 2019 report and is not recorded here.