By Xinghui Kok
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Singapore-based crypto exchange said its chief executive will go live on YouTube on Monday to answer questions around some transactions on the platform that had sparked speculation and fund withdrawals.
Chief executive Kris Marszalek said on Twitter on Sunday that the exchange had mistakenly sent 320,000 ether to another exchange called Gate.io on Oct. 21. The 320,000 ether accounted for 80% of the Ethereum tokens that Crypto.com held and was worth about US$400 million.
“In this particular case the whitelisted address belonged to one of our corporate accounts in a 3rd party exchange instead of our cold wallet. We have since strengthened our process and systems to better manage these internal transfers,” he tweeted.
He was scheduled to begin his livestream at 0700 GMT.
Marszalek said the ether was recovered and returned to the exchange, but that failed to calm a jittery market. The Wall Street Journal reported that withdrawals at Crypto.com rose over the weekend after Marszalek’s tweet.
The cryptocurrency market is already on edge with the spectacular public collapse of FTX last week. FTX had gone from being one of the largest exchanges worldwide to filing for bankruptcy. A Reuters report found that at least $1 billion of client funds were missing from FTX.
The movement of ether at Crypto.com was discovered by a user who dug through transactions after the company posted its cold wallet addresses online.
Reuters was not immediately able to reach Crypto.com for comment.
(Reporting by Xinghui Kok; Editing by Vidya Ranganathan and Sam Holmes)
