Investing.com - Cryptocurrency prices rose on Friday, with Bitcoin inching towards the $4,000 mark with no clear driver. Meanwhile, the CEO of Coinbase tweeted support for disgraced platform Quadriga.
Bitcoin gained 0.59% to $3,973.10 as of 9:14 AM ET (14:14 GMT) on the Investing.com Index.
Cryptocurrencies overall rose to a market cap of $135 billion at the time of writing.
Ethereum jumped 2% to $148.20 as its Constantinople hard fork is expected to take place at the end of the month. XRP inched up 0.13% to $0.32146, while Litecoin was at $49.58, a rise of 1%.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said he doesn’t think that Canadian platform Quadriga staged its downfall to scam investors, as some have theorized.
“(QuadrigaCX) was one of the oldest exchanges in existence (founded in 2013). If they planned an exit scam, it likely would have been timed better,” he said in a series of tweets.
But an investigation by Coinbase suggests the last months of operations posed questions about possible mismanagement at the company.
“Sequence of events suggests this was a mismanagement with later attempt to cover for it. This implies that at least few people inside Qadriga knew that they were running fractional. If so, then it's possible that untimely death of their CEO was used as an outlet to let the company sink,” he said.
Quadriga is facing multiple lawsuits from users who are trying to secure missing funds after CEO Gerald Cotten died unexpectedly in India in early December and did not leave the password for access to a cold wallet.
The firm only has access to its hot wallets, which are connected to the internet. But the wallets have less than $1 million, far from the C$180 million ($135.39 million) of digital coins that are frozen in users accounts.