Investing.com - Cryptocurrency prices continued to rise on Wednesday, with Bitcoin reaching a one-week high and eyeing the $4,000 mark once again, despite a lack of obvious price catalysts.
Bitcoin gained 2.56% to $3,845.10 as of 8:30 AM ET (13:30 GMT) on the Investing.com Index.
Cryptocurrencies overall were higher, rising to $132 billion at the time of writing from $128 billion on Tuesday.
Ethereum rose 5.9% to $137.14 and XRP rose 1.7% to $0.31394 while Litecoin was at $54.596, up 10%.
The most interesting industry story of the last 24 hours has, however, not shown the crypto sector in its best light. A report from court-appointed monitor Ernst & Young fed suspicions that customer deposits at crypto exchange QuadrigaCX were misappropriated before its owner died in December.
EY said the cold wallets that were said to have contained Quadriga customers' missing funds are actually empty.
In fact, no deposit was made into the cold wallets since April 2018, except for one, which was emptied of its contents on Dec. 3, 2018, the report found.
EY says there is evidence that the missing coins may have been transferred to accounts at other exchanges. It has offered a $100,000 reward for information on where Quadriga users’ cash has gone.
The exchange owes CA$180 million dollars ($135.39 million) to users and faces multiple lawsuits over the missing funds.
In other news, hacked New Zealand crypto exchange Cryptopia is back online. The platform lost almost 10% of its assets after hackers stole coins from the exchange in early January. At the moment the website is in read-only mode and will introduce cancel-only mode before full operations recommence.