Singapore Court Freezes $58M in Bitcoin and USDC Over Exchange Transfer Error
A Singapore court has intervened in a high-stakes cryptocurrency dispute, freezing approximately $58 million worth of Bitcoin and USDC after an exchange mistakenly transferred digital assets to a customer. The freeze order bars the customer from moving or selling roughly 780 BTC and 816,773 USDC while the dispute is resolved.
The case involves an unnamed exchange described as one of the world's largest digital-asset trading platforms. Court records show the customer had maintained accounts with the platform since around 2013 and later founded a blockchain project in 2016 before establishing their own cryptocurrency exchange.
The core issue emerged from a ledger discrepancy, where the exchange continued to show the customer held 2,500 Bitcoin and 2,500 Bitcoin Cash in wallets that had actually been emptied in March 2020. In June 2024, an automated remediation tool triggered the exchange to send 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH from its own holdings to the customer, creating a double-spend incident.
The exchange identified the error on January 29, 2025, and clawed back 1,700 BTC and 2,500 BCH from the customer's wallet. The customer has resisted returning the remaining balance, asserting a claim to the disputed tokens and disputing the platform's account of events.