New Zealand-based cryptocurrency exchange, Cryptopia, which was hacked and stole $16 million last January, managed to recover NZ$7.2 million, equivalent to $4.74 million.

Where issued The company that oversees accounting and liquidation, Grant Thornton Corporation, released a report on Wednesday detailing the assets recovered and the challenges the company faces in tracking down some of the user’s funds.

Overall the company recovered NZ$10.9 million of new receipts from May to November, which includes NZ$5 million from a third-party trust fund, and NZ$4.4 million of the platform’s 344 Bitcoins transferred.

and NZ$200,000 from the sale of assets such as furniture and equipment from the Cryptopia office.

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However, the expenses arising from the ongoing liquidation process are NZ$3.7 million including distributions to creditors, salaries, legal expenses and liquidation fees.

That leaves 7,164,835 NZD in assets that could potentially be refunded to users.

This process will likely take some time.

Although the report is under implementation, the report also provides an explanation of the process, which says that the process will take the necessary time to identify the holdings of each client, according to the financial liquidation company, which stated the following:

We reconcile the accounts of more than 900,000 active clients.

Many of them own multiple crypto assets, millions of transactions, and possibly over 900 different crypto assets.

The statement added:

It is very difficult to know how much assets customers hold in Cryptopia, citing two reasons.

First, the clients did not have individual wallets and secondly the crypto assets were aggregated into public wallets.

Liquidator Grant Thornton added the following clarification:

While Cryptopia keeps details of clients’ holdings and informs them about it in the platform, the same crypto assets have been (mixed) aggregated into wallets.

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As a central exchange, clients’ trades occurred in the exchange’s internal ledger without confirmation on the blockchain.

In addition, the platform has never completed reconciling its clients’ databases with the cryptocurrencies that are actually in their wallets, leaving it a huge task to verify each user’s holdings.

A potential obstacle to final payments is the fact that there are legal issues that must be resolved first.

The liquidator has appealed to the New Zealand High Court for guidance on the legal status of crypto assets in the country.

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Grant Thornton said:

The court will judge whether the crypto assets constitute ownership or not, deciding whether or not they can be held in trust for the affected clients.

The next legal report will be in May 2020, but another update to stakeholders is expected after the February Supreme Court hearing.

It is worth noting that “Cryptopia” entered the liquidation in May after it suffered financial losses and its trading volume fell due to the hack that occurred in January.

Soon after, Grant Thornton filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States in order to keep the only records of customer data stored on a server in Arizona.

Read also:

The hacked platform Cryptopia continues its quest to get back investors’ money

Report: The rights of users of the “Cryptopia” platform exceed $ 2.6 million