Prime Trust collapse — what creditors were owed and recovered (2023)

Prime Trust was a Nevada-chartered trust company that custodied fiat and cryptocurrency, serving end users mostly indirectly through fintech and crypto 'integrator' partners rather than directly. The Delaware court's 2025 opinion records that at its peak the business processed over 300,000 transactions a day and held more than $3.8 billion in cryptocurrency and fiat.

In March 2018 it created cold-storage legacy wallets. In January 2021 it inadvertently gave customers deposit addresses for one of them, and in December 2021, when a customer requested a large ether withdrawal it could not fill, it discovered it no longer had access to that wallet. It covered withdrawals from other sources instead.

The Nevada Financial Institutions Division issued a cease-and-desist order on 21 June 2023, finding the company insolvent, operating in an unsafe and unsound manner, and unable to honour customer withdrawals; it reported negative stockholders' equity of more than $12 million at the end of March 2023. The division petitioned to place it in receivership on 26 June 2023, and the Nevada court granted it.

Prime Core Technologies, Prime Trust LLC, Prime IRA and Prime Digital filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on 14 August 2023, case 23-11161, before Judge J. Kate Stickles. The petition estimated liabilities of $100 million to $500 million against assets of $50 million to $100 million and 25,000 to 50,000 creditors. The headline liabilities figure recorded here is the floor of that petition band, because no consolidated claims total was ever published. A liquidating plan was confirmed on 21 December 2023 and took effect on 5 January 2024.