A British investor who had all but given up on bitcoin locked in a defunct exchange for about 14 years has recovered the assets. The bitcoin, bought for about 1,500 pounds (about 2.7 million won), is now worth about $4.5 million (about 6 billion won).
According to crypto news outlet CoinDesk on the 7th, the British investor, known by the pseudonym Chris, bought about 1,500 pounds worth of bitcoin in December 2011 through the U.K. crypto exchange Britcoin.
Britcoin was one of the earliest bitcoin exchanges to emerge in Britain and later changed its name to Intersango. At the time, bitcoin was little known to the public and closer to an experimental asset, yet the exchange drew thousands of users. According to U.K. broadcaster LBC, Intersango had more than 5,000 accounts when it was operating.
The exchange began running into trouble in late 2012. Pound and dollar trading was suspended, and by early 2014 the site had become completely inaccessible. Users who tried to withdraw their assets reportedly received no proper response. According to U.K. Companies House records, the Intersango corporate entity was formally dissolved in March 2016.
Chris also tried to pull out his bitcoin after hearing that something was wrong with the exchange, but he could not log into his account. He made several more attempts to retrieve the assets with no result, and eventually came to regard the bitcoin as lost.
"The hardest part was watching the bitcoin price rise and thinking about what I could have done with that money," Chris said. "I had a young child and a new house at the time, and my finances weren't good, so it was a shock."
There was an even more painful twist. Chris reportedly received an email around 2018 that two Intersango co-founders had sent to former users, but he suspected it was a scam and deleted it. Bitcoin had already risen sharply by then, but he had not imagined the assets might still be there.
The turning point came this year, when his family urged him to seek help from the U.K. law firm CEL Solicitors. Using crypto tracing technology from its sister company, The Crypto Tracing Experts, the firm traced wallets believed to hold assets belonging to former Intersango users. In the process, it found a wallet containing more than 5,500 bitcoin.
Getting the assets back was not simple. Chris had to prove that he had actually bought the bitcoin more than a decade earlier and that he owned it. The firm obtained bank transaction records from about 15 years ago and other documents to verify ownership. It also reportedly handled paperwork tied to a U.S. court.
Chris ultimately succeeded in recovering bitcoin he had been unable to reach for more than a decade. The recovered assets were worth about $4.5 million at the time of the CoinDesk report. Bitcoin traded below $4 apiece when he first bought it, compared with about $76,500 at the time of the report.
Chris plans to use part of the recovered assets for his family. He intends to help pay down a loan on a house his son recently bought and to improve the family's housing situation, according to the report. He does not plan to cash out all of his bitcoin, however, and will keep some of it.
The case has raised interest in whether other former Intersango users can also recover assets that have been locked up for years. CEL Solicitors said anyone with records proving they bought bitcoin at the time — such as the email address used on the exchange, emails sent by Intersango, or bank transfer records — can attempt to recover the assets.
The firm believes more than 5,500 bitcoin remain in wallets thought to be linked to Intersango. That amounts to hundreds of billions of won at current prices, raising the possibility that more former users will recover assets.
