What it was
Cryptopia Limited, New Zealand company number 2392901, ran a cryptocurrency exchange out of Christchurch. The liquidators' reports describe a business that scaled up hard during the 2018 boom, signing long-term, high-cost infrastructure contracts, and then watched trading volume fall away through late 2018 while those contracts stayed. At the date of liquidation it had over 2.2 million registered users and 37 staff.
What happened
In January 2019 the exchange was hacked and a significant amount of crypto assets was taken. The company called the New Zealand Police and closed the exchange for trading. The liquidators put it flatly: the damage to the company's reputation cut trading volume further, and Cryptopia could not meet its debts as they fell due. On 14 May 2019 the shareholders resolved to appoint David Ruscoe and Malcolm Moore of Grant Thornton New Zealand as liquidators under section 241(2)(a) of the Companies Act 1993.
The source of the hack has still not been identified, which is why the liquidators had to rebuild most of the exchange's wallet environment from scratch and reconstruct parts of it forensically. The reports also record that a full reconciliation between the coins in the wallets and the balances shown to customers had never been done.
The distribution
This is the part worth reading if you want to know what happens after an exchange dies. The coins were held on trust for account holders, and the High Court has directed how they are returned: entitlements calculated as at 14 May 2019, a staged claims process running from registration to identity verification to balance acceptance to wallet collection, costs allocated per trust and per account holder, and a hard cut-off. Justice Palmer released the directions judgment on 1 March 2024; the final cut-off date, as amended, was 30 September 2025.
The first distribution, in bitcoin and dogecoin, was made in December 2024. By the liquidators' fourteenth report, dated 11 December 2025, 16,850 qualifying account holders had received over NZD 487 million across six currencies. The liquidation is still open.
Listing here is not endorsement.