Crypto exchange lawsuits explained by Ilia Zavialov: the company playbook after the freeze

01

Why this became a corporate question

Treasury balances, payroll experiments, a subsidiary holding a settlement float, a supplier who asked to be paid in stablecoin. Exposure to a platform rarely arrives as a decision. It accumulates through small convenient choices that nobody wrote a policy for.

When the platform stops paying, every one of those small choices becomes a line item somebody has to explain. The auditor asks what the balance was and where it is recorded, the bank asks whether the company is solvent, and the board asks who approved it.

The industry made this more likely rather than less. More than a hundred crypto projects shut down, filed for bankruptcy or went dark during 2026, and the first half of the year set a record with 1.1 billion dollars lost to hacks alone.

So the useful posture is not prediction. Nobody reliably picks which platform fails next. The useful posture is knowing exactly what you do in the twenty four hours after one of them stops paying.

It is worth saying plainly that the regulatory picture has moved too, and not in the direction that helps here. Oversight shifted away from cases about operating without registration and towards fraud, with classification of crypto assets clarified jointly rather than fought platform by platform. That is healthier for the market and it does nothing for a company holding a frozen balance, because a fraud case punishes somebody after the fact rather than returning the money.

02

The first day: what to record

Take a full export before the interface changes. Balances, transaction history, every confirmation email, the terms of service as they read today, and screenshots with a visible clock. Platforms in trouble rewrite their terms and their help pages quickly, and the version you agreed to stops being available.

Write down the exact wording used to explain the pause. Maintenance, upgrade, regulatory review and liquidity event are different claims with different legal weight, and which one appeared first matters to anybody assessing the case later.

Preserve the account the way it is. Do not close it, do not move the residue, do not accept a settlement offer that appears in the first week. All three actions are hard to undo and all three weaken a claim.

Assign one person to own the file from that hour. Not a committee. Cases run for years, the paperwork is repetitive, and every handover loses the detail that turned out to matter.

03

Claim class decides almost everything

Recovery is not one number. It is a different number for each class of claim, and the class is set by how the asset was held rather than by how much was held. That distinction surprises people more than any other part of the process.

Assets in a custody arrangement, where the platform held them for you and never lent them, usually sit closest to full recovery. Holders of that arrangement at one failed lender received 425 million dollars, a complete return of what was there.

Assets in an interest bearing or earn product are a different claim entirely. The same failure paid those holders somewhere between 15 and 72 percent, and the spread inside a single bankruptcy is wider than most people expect.

Read the product name in your own statements before assuming which one you hold. Companies routinely discover that what internal notes called a deposit was contractually a loan to the platform, and that single word moves the recovery by tens of percent.

04

The clawback nobody expects

Getting your money out before the collapse is not the end of the story. Withdrawals made in the ninety days before a bankruptcy filing can be demanded back as preferential transfers, on the theory that no creditor should be paid ahead of equally ranked creditors.

For anyone counted as connected to the platform, the look back is a full year rather than ninety days. Companies with an advisory relationship, a marketing agreement or a seat in a partner program sometimes discover they fall into that category.

This is not theoretical. Several thousand claims were filed against account holders who withdrew and declined to settle, and the demand letters arrive long after people consider the matter closed.

The practical consequence is a rule about timing. Money withdrawn from a wobbling platform is not clean for three months, and a company that immediately spends it can end up funding a repayment it did not budget for.

05

What the auditor and the bank will ask

Both ask the same question in different words: what is this balance actually worth today. A claim in a bankruptcy is an asset with an uncertain value and a long horizon, and pretending it is cash in the accounts is the fastest way to a qualified opinion.

Have the class of claim, the filing reference and the distribution history ready in one document. Institutions accept uncertainty when it is documented and become difficult when it is vague.

Expect the banking relationship to feel the effect regardless of the amount. Compliance teams read a crypto platform failure as a reason to re-examine the whole account, and a company that answers with a tidy file gets through that review far faster than one that improvises.

The reputational cost lands here first, before any customer notices. It is measured in extra questions, slower approvals and a review that was not on anybody's calendar.

06

The contract worth reading before, not after

Three clauses decide most of the outcome, and all three are readable in twenty minutes. Where the assets are held, whether the platform may lend them, and which jurisdiction hears a dispute.

The custody question is the one that changes the recovery class. Language about pooling, rehypothecation or the platform using assets for general business purposes means the balance is a loan, whatever the marketing page called it.

The jurisdiction clause decides whether a claim is practical at all. A dispute heard somewhere with no functioning insolvency procedure turns a legal right into an expensive letter.

Keep a dated copy of the terms you agreed to on the day you agreed to them. Platforms amend terms without notice, and the version on the site during a collapse is rarely the version that governed your account.

07

Who inside the company owns this

The failure mode is predictable: finance assumes legal is handling it, legal assumes finance has the numbers, and the person who actually opened the account left last year. Name an owner in writing before there is an incident.

Give that person authority to freeze further exposure without a meeting. In the hours when a platform is wobbling, the ability to stop new transfers immediately is worth more than any analysis produced a week later.

Two people approve any movement of company assets onto or off a platform, and neither of them is the person who holds the credentials. This is the same rule that protects payment runs, applied to a place where it is usually forgotten.

Keep the list of platforms the company touches on one page, with the balance and the owner. Most firms are genuinely surprised by that page the first time somebody assembles it.

08

The reputational bill arrives later

Customers and partners do not distinguish between being a victim of a platform and being careless with money. The sentence that circulates is that your company lost funds on a crypto exchange, and the detail disappears within a day.

The ground is already unfavourable. Roughly 65 percent of surveyed voters report high distrust of cryptocurrency and only 20 percent say they trust it, so an incident lands on an audience that was sceptical before it heard your name.

Trust in the platforms specifically is lower still. Among people who have never held crypto, 4 percent consider exchanges fully trustworthy, against 38 percent among holders, and nearly half say they trust an ordinary bank more.

Which means the communication cannot be technical. A correct explanation of claim classes convinces a court and nobody else. What works publicly is a short statement of what happened, what is recoverable and what changed afterwards.

09

What to change in the procedure

Cap exposure per platform as a policy number rather than a habit. The cap should survive a good quarter, because the balance that hurts is always the one that grew quietly while everything was working.

Separate operational float from holdings. Money needed for settlement this week and money held for any other reason should not sit in the same place, because the first one justifies speed and the second one does not.

Review the terms of every platform the company uses once a year on a fixed date, and record what changed. Amendments to custody language are the early warning that no market feed provides.

Run the failure once as an exercise. One hour, the named owner, the export, the memo to the auditor. A team that has done it once acts in the first day instead of spending it deciding who decides.

10

What not to do

Do not sign the first settlement offer. Early offers exist because early certainty is cheap for the estate, and the classes that eventually recovered most were the ones that waited.

Do not pay anybody who offers to recover the funds for a fee. That approach follows every collapse, it targets people who have just confirmed their loss publicly, and it succeeds because the victim wants it to be true.

Do not describe the balance as recovered until it has actually arrived. Interim distributions get announced, delayed and revised, and a company that books the announcement rather than the payment explains itself twice.

Do not let the incident quietly close without changing anything. The only outcome worse than losing money on a platform is losing it, absorbing the reputational cost, and leaving the same procedure in place for next time.