Tether-backed Chilean exchange Orionx is permanently shutting down after a forensic audit found that more than $7 million in customer assets had been moved to wallets outside the company’s custody. Withdrawals are suspended while the firm works to return what it can to clients, and it has filed a criminal complaint against two of its co-founders.
The audit traced the missing funds to transfers that allegedly took place between 2018 and 2021, according to local reports. Orionx says the money moved to addresses it does not control, which means the assets sat outside the exchange’s custody systems for years before the shortfall surfaced. The company has not said when it discovered the transfers or what triggered the forensic review, and it has not named the auditor.
Criminal complaint against founders
The exchange named former executives and co-founders Roberto Zibert and Joaquin Diaz in its criminal complaint. Both men deny any wrongdoing. Chilean prosecutors will now review wallet records and internal transfers covering a period that predates Tether’s investment by several years. Nobody has been charged, and the case will turn on whether the transfers were authorized under the company’s internal controls at the time. The two men have said through representatives that they were not involved in moving the funds.
Orionx has not published a full repayment schedule. The company said only that withdrawals are temporarily paused as it works to recover as much of client assets as possible, a formulation that leaves open how much of the shortfall customers will actually get back. Users with balances on the platform have no stated timeline for when, or whether, they will be made whole, and the exchange has not confirmed whether it holds insurance covering custodial losses.
Tether’s LatAm bet
Tether led Orionx’s Series A funding round in June 2025 as part of a push into Latin America. The Chilean exchange was one of the market’s longer-running local platforms, and the backing was meant to signal stability in a region where crypto adoption has grown faster than regulatory oversight. Tether has spent the past two years investing in exchanges, wallets and payment rails across Latin America, treating the region as one of its main growth markets outside the United States.
The shutdown now sits awkwardly next to that story. Tether has not said whether it will write down the investment or support customer compensation, and the size of its remaining exposure to the company is unclear. The firm did not respond to requests for comment on the audit findings. A source familiar with the matter told local reporters that Tether learned of the shortfall only after the audit was complete, which suggests the diligence done at the time of the investment did not surface the historical transfers.
A familiar pattern
Custody shortfalls discovered years after the fact are a recurring failure mode in the industry. Funds moved out during an earlier era of weaker internal controls often surface only when a withdrawal spike or an audit forces a reconciliation. By then, the trail runs through mixers, OTC desks and cold wallets that may have been spent down long ago. Recovery rates in comparable cases have ranged from a small fraction of the missing assets to nothing at all, and the lag between the transfers and their discovery makes tracing harder every year.
The 2018 to 2021 window matters here. Chile had almost no crypto-specific regulation during those years, and exchanges operated with minimal external auditing. Reconciling customer balances against on-chain holdings was not a requirement, and internal transfers between hot and cold wallets went largely unmonitored by anyone outside the company. Several other regional exchanges from that era have failed in similar circumstances, though few with a major backer attached.
Chile has been tightening its crypto oversight since then, moving to bring exchanges under financial-sector supervision. The Orionx transfers predate most of the current framework, and that gap is likely to feature in the political debate over how quickly the new rules should take effect. Opposition lawmakers have already cited the case in arguments for faster implementation, according to local coverage of the shutdown.
What happens next
Customers face an uncertain recovery process. The exchange has not said whether it will pursue the former executives’ personal assets, insurance, or proceeds from any criminal case. Forensic audits of this kind typically take months, and distributions, when they happen, tend to be partial. Chilean insolvency law gives unsecured creditors limited priority, and crypto balances have historically been treated inconsistently in local proceedings, which adds another layer of uncertainty for account holders.
The criminal case will move on a separate track. Prosecutors will seek to establish who authorized the transfers and where the funds went, a question the audit has partially answered but courts will need to confirm. The named co-founders have retained counsel, according to local reports, and both have said they intend to cooperate with the investigation while maintaining their innocence. A trial, if it happens, is unlikely to conclude before 2028 given the pace of white-collar proceedings in Chile.
For Tether, the episode is a reputational problem rather than a financial one. The $7 million figure is small against the company’s reserves, but the failure of a portfolio company it publicly championed will draw scrutiny the next time it leads a funding round in an emerging market. Its LatAm investment thesis depended on picking credible local operators, and this was one of its marquee deals in the region. Competitors will not let the association go unmentioned.
For Chilean users, the lesson is the one the industry keeps relearning: an exchange’s custody claims are only as good as its controls, and an audit years after the transfers is confirmation, not protection. Regulators in Santiago will now have a concrete case study to point to the next time someone argues that oversight can wait. Whether it changes the pace of rulemaking is another question entirely.