After the arrest of one of the founders of OKEx and the suspension of withdrawals, rumors emerged that the exchange was storing users’ assets in a cold, one-signature wallet. However, the company denies this.
The press service of the OKEx exchange told the industrial media that the information published on the Jinse Caijing website regarding the storage of cryptoassets of exchange users in a cold wallet with one signature is incorrect.
Recall that the founder of the exchange, Xu Mingxing, was detained by the Chinese police earlier this month, after which the withdrawal of crypto assets from the exchange was suspended due to the “unavailability” of one of the holders of the private keys.
A spokesman said he could not “disclose any information as it could jeopardize users’ assets.” He also did not say when the withdrawal will be resumed. The posting from the Jinse Caijing website has been removed.
When asked if OKEx uses a single-signature wallet, the press service referred to a 51% attack report on Ethereum Classic, which details the process of withdrawing crypto assets from the exchange, including the use of “semi-autonomous multisignature” for hot wallets.
According to the report, 95% of money is held in cold wallets. The cold wallet security detail page states that when generating private keys, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) password is “controlled by two exchange employees” – one at the OKEx office in Beijing and the other in a city on the west coast of the United States.
To withdraw cryptoassets, an employee visits “a bank safe near the office and retrieves the required number of unused encrypted private keys.” It then scans the QR code of the keys on two separate stand-alone computers. Thereafter, “the owner of the master AES password decrypts the private key on a completely autonomous computer.”
The final step is “signing the transaction on another completely autonomous computer. After that, the signature of the transaction is synchronized via a USB drive with a computer connected to the Internet and broadcast to the network. ”
Recall that last month, the Chinese police began to investigate the activities of an OTC cryptocurrency trader due to participation in a deal with $ 73,500 obtained by illegal means. It is assumed that the funds were initially deposited on the OKEx exchange.
