Crypto Insolvencies
Recent years have seen a lot of examples of crypto insolvencies. The timeline below shows some well-known examples.
- 2014 – Mt. Gox (Japan) operated from 2010 to 2014 until it suffered a hack and became insolvent.
- 2019 – Cryptopia, a New Zealand exchange was said to have been “hacked to death” and went into liquidation in New Zealand and there was also a US filing under Chapter 15.
- 2019 – Quadriga, one of Canada’s first crypto exchanges, suffered payment processing and accounting problems as well as the death of its founder. It entered an insolvency procedure in Canada.
- 2020 – FCoin, a Singapore crypto exchange, was found to have a significant shortfall in crypto assets and entered an insolvency procedure in Singapore.
- 2022 – The “Crypto Winter” was triggered by the collapse of Singapore algorithmic stablecoin Terra/Luna, as well as rising interest rates and instability caused by the war in Ukraine.
- 2022 – By November, the most high-profile victim was the exchange FTX, based in the Bahamas, which went into Chapter 11 under the US Bankruptcy Code amid findings of financial wrongdoing.
- 2022 – The year saw many other failures of crypto businesses including Singapore exchange Zipmex, Hong Kong crypto lender Babel Finance, and US crypto lender Voyager Digital and US crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.
- 2023 – Bittrex Global, an exchange operating in Liechtenstein and Bermuda, entered insolvency proceedings in those countries and in the US.
- 2023 – The year also saw the collapse of Hodlnaut, a crypto lending and borrowing platform in Singapore, which went into liquidation.
- The future? The project will consider where future crypto failures might arise, whether crypto exhanges, crypto assets or other service providers in this sector.