In recent headlines, the Golix CEO is facing accusations that point to the fact that he lost the password to the company’s bitcoin wallet.
Initial reports on iHarare pointed to the fact that the Golix CEO Tawanda Kembo lost the password to the companies cold bitcoin wallet. According to the report, the Golix CEO lost 33 bitcoins worth over $250 thousand.
iHarare also wrote that the “The password fiasco was confirmed by two separate sources who used to work for Golix, Zimbabwe’s first and at one time biggest crypto exchange.”
This series of events coincided with the regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrency activities at the time.
Golix has always had battles with regulators in Zimbabwe. The cryptocurrency exchange had to shelve its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) plans in 2018 due to a directive from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) that ban all cryptocurrency activities.
As a result, Golix took the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) to court, to contest their directive. Golix then relaunched its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and raised an undisclosed sum of money.
Golix eventually lost the battle against regulators, in the long run, causing the project to slow down.
What Really Happened?
Tawanda Kembo in an attempt to set the record straight published a guest post on iHarare, the same site that broke the initial report about the password loss.
In the post, Kembo addressed the bitcoin password loss and alleged withdrawal issues on their platform. Kembo did not deny or confirm the loss of funds but instead called it a story taken out of context. He said:
I was an early adopter of bitcoin and anyone that got into bitcoin the time I did will remember that bitcoin was dirt cheap and we didn’t have an easy to use wallets such as the one Golix built. My first wallet, for example, was only accessible from a Linux terminal and although I don’t regret losing it back then (because bitcoin was so cheap), if I had kept it, it would have been worth a lot of money today. I’ve often told such stories at various talks I’ve given over the years and this has been taken out of context.
He also indicated that cryptocurrency withdrawals are working smoothly but fiat withdrawals are not due to issues with banks as a result of issues with regulations.
According to Kembo, the team is building the platform to the best of their ability regardless of the issues that have hit them in recent times.
This will probably not be the first or the last time as such occurrences have become excessively common in the cryptocurrency space. Similarly Sato Wallet, a popular Nigerian cryptocurrency wallet also attributed their loss of millions of funds to a cloud service hack.
