Orionx, a Chilean crypto exchange backed by Tether, has begun shutting down permanently after a forensic audit found more than $7 million in customer assets had been moved to wallets the company does not control. Withdrawals are suspended and the exchange has filed a criminal complaint against two co-founders, who deny wrongdoing. The collapse comes barely 15 months after Tether led the company’s funding round as part of its Latin American expansion.
The company announced the closure on September 4 in a statement on X. Our sole priority now is to return as much of our clients’ assets as possible, the exchange said, adding that withdrawals are temporarily suspended. It filed the criminal complaint with Chilean prosecutors on September 3 against former executives Roberto Zibert and Joaquin Diaz, both co-founders who allegedly had access to the company’s custody systems, and notified the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Chile.
How the gap surfaced
According to the complaint, cited by the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, the discrepancy came to light on August 27, when chief operating officer Thomas Mac Millan found a significant mismatch between balances recorded in Orionx’s systems and the assets actually held in custody. An internal review followed, and the company commissioned an external forensic audit that compared its internal records against data verifiable on-chain.
The audit found that balances recorded for Bitcoin, Ether, XRP and Polygon exceeded the assets sitting at Orionx’s custody addresses. The complaint alleges the outflows occurred between 2018 and 2021, including transfers to accounts on other crypto platforms, meaning the shortfall went unnoticed for five to eight years. An account associated with Diaz allegedly received more than $1.5 million across 14 transfers, while another wallet allegedly received 187 Ether, more than 4.1 million USDT and 200,000 USDC, according to La Tercera.
Zibert and Diaz denied the allegations. They said they never acted against customers’ interests and that the cause of the shortfall remains unclear. The company has not explained how much of the missing amount remains traceable or recoverable, and no independent estimate of recoverable assets has emerged.
A compliance review found what trading never did
The discovery came out of paperwork, not a hack. Orionx had been working to comply with Chile’s Fintech Law, and in 2025 it conducted an internal review of its operations and brought in financial professionals. That process eventually led to the external audit, which means a regulatory compliance exercise uncovered a gap that had sat undetected through years of normal operations and an institutional funding round.
The timing is uncomfortable for Tether. The stablecoin issuer led Orionx’s Series A round in June 2025, exclusively, as part of its push into Latin America, roughly 15 months before the collapse. Tether’s announcement of the investment has since been removed from its website and survives only in an archived version. Orionx was founded in Chile in 2017 and grew from a retail exchange into a platform offering payment and financial services in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2017 | Orionx founded in Chile |
| 2018-2021 | Alleged outflows from custody per the criminal complaint |
| June 2025 | Tether leads Series A as part of LatAm expansion |
| 2025 | Internal review launched for Fintech Law compliance |
| August 27, 2026 | COO finds mismatch between records and custody balances |
| September 3, 2026 | Criminal complaint filed against Zibert and Diaz |
| September 4, 2026 | Permanent shutdown announced, withdrawals suspended |
A rough stretch for exchanges
Orionx lands in a broader 2026 shutdown wave. BitMEX is set to cease operations on September 23, BitMart has told customers it will close by January 31, 2027, and the marketplace NoOnes is winding down after sanctions hit its partners. None of those closures stems from the same cause as Orionx, but together they mark a consolidation period for smaller platforms, and the Orionx case adds a custody-integrity dimension to it. Regional peers in Latin America will be watching how Chilean regulators respond, since the Fintech Law review process is what surfaced the problem here.
What customers can expect
For customers, the immediate question is how much of the missing $7 million can be clawed back. The company has not said when the transfers occurred beyond the 2018-2021 window alleged in the complaint, nor how much remains traceable. Withdrawals stay suspended for now, and the exchange says the suspension is meant to ensure no client gains an advantage by withdrawing before others. That framing suggests a pro-rata distribution process once recoverable assets are identified, though no timeline has been given and no recovery plan has been published.
The criminal case against the two former executives will proceed separately from the wind-down. Under the complaint, prosecutors will examine whether the transfers described were authorized, and the former executives’ defense that the cause of the shortfall remains unclear sets up a factual dispute about who moved the funds and why. The audit’s on-chain comparison gives investigators a paper trail that internal records alone would not have provided, since every movement out of custody addresses is publicly visible in principle.
For the wider market, the case is another data point on custody risk at mid-sized regional exchanges, and on how slowly such gaps surface when internal controls are weak. The funds left custody years before the audit caught up with them, and nothing in the public record suggests customers or the investor would have known from the outside. The lesson regulators in Chile and elsewhere will likely draw is that compliance-driven audits of custody balances are worth mandating, because market discipline did not catch this one.