In what seems to be a repeated mistake, Crypto.com has again sent money by mistake, only to recover it later. The fall of FTX shocked the cryptocurrency market in ways that few imagined, yet there is some silver lining, however little it may seem.
For the first time, most of the largest exchanges chose to proceed with their proof-of-reserves and reveal the bulk of their addresses holding funds on their platforms. Crypto.com is one of the exchanges that revealed their addresses, revealing how much and what cryptocurrency they keep on behalf of their customers.
However, shortly after the information became public, crypto community members noticed a 320,000 ETH transaction sent out from one of the exchange’s accounts. This accounted for around 80% of the ETH held on Crypto.com. Kris Marszalek, the company’s CEO, explained what happened:
The transfer was supposed to go to a new cold storage address, but it was sent to a whitelisted external exchange address. We collaborated with the Gate team, and the funds were eventually restored to our cold storage. To avoid this from happening again, new processes and features were introduced.
Regardless of the reasoning, the community is left wondering how it is possible to transmit £337.41 million in ETH to an address that was not the intended recipient. This is not the first time Crypto.com has made a similar mistake.
Last year, the exchange gave a woman £8.4 million instead of £84.35. The most concerning aspect is that the mistake was not detected for seven months.
