Poolin collapse — what creditors were owed and recovered (2022)
Nothing has been distributed to wallet holders in the four years since the freeze. The IOU tokens are not a payment; they are the claim, restated in a token. Any recovery now runs through the Chapter 11 estate, where the wallet claims rank as unsecured and the principal asset is a US$52 million stalking-horse bid for mining sites held by affiliated debtors rather than by the company the wallet holders banked with.
Case facts
| Customers lost access | |
|---|---|
| Insolvency filed | July 22, 2026 |
| Business | Mining company |
| Jurisdiction | United States |
| Procedure | Chapter 11D.N.J. · 26-18325 |
| Owed to creditors | $163,723,50011,700 creditors |
| Distributed so far | Nothing |
| Recovery | 0%No distributions yet — The estate has not paid creditors anything. |
| Cause | Liquidity runPoolin said only that its wallet service faced liquidity problems as withdrawal demand rose. It has never published what became of the deposits, and the shortfall was never closed. |
| Case status | Ongoing |
What happened
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 held by the Lonestar entities, for which Thor CALAP LLC has bid US$52 million as stalking horse — US$15 million for the Pyote site and US$37 million for Tarbush. That is not a recovery rate for wallet holders, and the arithmetic is not US$52 million against US$163.7 million: the wallet claims sit against the Singapore parent, so what reaches them depends on liens, how the estates are allocated between the debtors, the parent's intercompany claim and the cost of the case. 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.
Sources
- CoinDeskSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
- CoinDeskSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
- CoinDeskSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
- CryptoSlateSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
- Bitcoin.com NewsSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
- Crowdfund InsiderSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
- CoinDeskSecondary · retrieved 2026-09-19
Changes to this entry
- Added during a re-check of the registry. The 2022 freeze was never measurable on its own, because Poolin published no claims total; the Chapter 11 filing of 22 July 2026 supplies one. The chief restructuring officer scheduled US$163,723,500 of unsecured wallet-holder IOUs owed to about 11,700 customers, which is the figure recorded here, inside total prepetition obligations of roughly US$173.1 million.
Cite this
This data is published under CC BY 4.0. You may reuse it, including commercially, as long as you credit iTokenly and link back.
iTokenly Crypto Failure Registry, "Poolin collapse — what creditors were owed and recovered (2022)", iTokenly, accessed 2026-09-19, https://itokenly.com/failures/poolinhttps://itokenly.com/failures/poolinPermalinks never change. If an entry is renamed, the old address keeps working.
Spotted an error? Write to [email protected]. Corrections to published figures are logged on this page. See the methodology for how entries are checked.