Poolin collapse — what creditors were owed and recovered (2022)

Poolin was for a period the largest bitcoin mining pool in the world, and it also ran Poolin Wallet, the custody service where mining payouts accumulated and where users held balances in several coins. From 22:00 GMT+8 on 5 September 2022 it suspended withdrawals, flash trades and internal transfers from that wallet, saying it faced liquidity problems caused by rising withdrawal demand. Mining continued. The money stopped moving.

On 15 September 2022 Poolin took a snapshot of user balances, set them to zero and issued six IOU tokens in their place — IOUBTC, IOUETH, IOUUSDT, IOULTC, IOUZEC and IOUDOGE — one for one against each holding, with the promise that they could be deposited back into the wallet and converted to real coins. For most holders that conversion never happened. In January 2023 a Singapore arbitrator ordered Poolin to return 88 BTC to a single customer whose balance had been converted this way; the company had not paid at the time that was reported.

Poolin Technology Pte. Ltd. and its US affiliates Lonestar Dream Inc. and Lonestar Taproot LLC filed Chapter 11 petitions in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on 22 July 2026, case 26-18325, three years and ten months after the freeze. Chief restructuring officer Michael DuFrayne put total prepetition obligations at about US$173.1 million, of which US$163,723,500 is unsecured IOUs owed to roughly 11,700 wallet holders with balances above US$100. That customer figure is the one recorded here; the wider US$173.1 million includes obligations that are not customer claims.

The estate's main asset is two mining sites in West Texas, Pyote and Tarbush, held by the Lonestar entities. Thor CALAP LLC opened as stalking horse at US$52 million. After an auction on 10 September 2026 Poolin selected a US$140 million transaction with Hut 8, citing greater certainty of closing, and on 30 September the court reopened the bidding with Hut 8's improved terms as the baseline. On 2 October 2026 the court approved the sale to the Hut 8 affiliates for up to US$180 million: US$100 million in cash at closing and up to US$80 million in milestone payments tied to future data-centre transactions at the sites. That is a gross price for assets of the US debtors, not a recovery rate for wallet holders. Their claims sit against the Singapore parent, so what reaches them depends on liens, the allocation of proceeds between the debtors, the parent's intercompany claim, the cost of the case and whether the milestones are ever met. No plan has been filed and nothing has been distributed.

Four years of silence sit between the freeze and the filing. Poolin never published an account of what the deposits were used for, and the Chapter 11 petition does not supply one either.