The CEO and founder of Golix, who operates a cryptocurrency exchange in Zimbabwe, recently lost the password to one of their cold wallets which contained access to a cold wallet with over 33 Bitcoins.

A local news report on November 1st says that Tawanda Kembo supposedly lost the password in May of 2018. Two other sources who were familiar with this issue also confirmed this startling revelation.

Access to 33 Bitcoins Lost By CEO

Once word got out regarding the lost password, financial watchdogs with Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank ordered the crypto exchange to shut their operations down because the exchange did not follow their regulatory procedures.

Golix has since ended communications with all of its customers. Meanwhile, there are still a large majority of customers who have not been successful in recovering their funds from the exchange.

Kembo made a guest post regarding the contentions that his exchange hadn’t processed any of his customers’ withdrawals. He says that insolvency did not prevent the exchange from processing the withdrawals as, according to him, nearly all of the people who tried to make withdrawals from Golix haven’t had any issues. In addition, Kembo says that claims from people who couldn’t withdraw their funds only made up around 1%.

Kembo didn’t deny, however, that he lost a password to get into 33 Bitcoins which, at press time, were worth $305,000. He believes the circumstances were blown out of proportion.

Zimbabwe’s Recent Ban on Foreign Currencies

Zimbabwe banned using foreign currency in July, which caused Bitcoin to rise during peer-to-peer trading. The country’s citizens are now paying premium prices to use Moneybookers, Western Union, and Paypal to trade Bitcoin. Kembo’s exchange fiasco has had little effect on existing cryptocurrency traders as they are willing to use other methods to obtain access to foreign currency.