TL;DR:
- Around $334 million in Bitcoin remains inaccessible at Zonda: the private keys were never transferred during the company’s ownership change.
- CEO Przemysław Kral revealed the wallet address holding 4,503 BTC and denied any responsibility in the disappearance of founder Suszek.
- The platform received over 25,000 withdrawal requests within hours after a series of posts questioning its solvency, according to Kral himself.
Polish exchange Zonda is facing one of the most severe credibility crises in its history. Its CEO, Przemysław Kral, published a video on Thursday in which he publicly disclosed for the first time the address of a cold wallet holding 4,503 Bitcoin, equivalent to approximately $334 million. The core issue: the private keys to that wallet were never handed over during the company’s ownership transfer.
According to Kral, the responsibility for transferring those keys fell on Sylwester Suszek, founder and former CEO of Zonda, who has been missing since March 2022. The CEO emphatically denied having misappropriated funds and rejected any connection to Suszek’s disappearance. “For all those who claim I had anything to do with Sylwester’s disappearance, this is the main argument that I care deeply about him being found,” he stated in the video.
Crisis at Zonda and Legal Action
The controversy has been building for weeks, after local media reported an alleged investigation by Polish authorities into the exchange. Adding to that, an analysis by blockchain platform Recoveris, published on April 6, alleged a sharp decline in Zonda’s hot wallet balances and suggested possible insolvency. Kral responded that same day denying those claims and stating that the company held more than 4,500 BTC in its possession.
The executive attributed the surge in withdrawals to negative media coverage. Zonda typically processed around 100,000 withdrawal requests per year, but received more than 25,000 within a matter of hours around April 6. Kral also announced that the company will pursue legal action over what he described as false statements, and pledged to fulfill all obligations to its customers.
Polish lawmaker Tomasz Mentzen noted on X that Zonda may have lost access to its cold wallet following Suszek’s disappearance. The exchange was founded in Poland in 2014 under the name BitBay and relaunched under its current identity in 2021. In February, Kral confirmed that the company moved its registration to Estonia due to regulatory uncertainty in Poland and delays in the implementation of MiCA.
