Singapore court freezes $58M in dispute between crypto exchange and customer

The Singapore International Commercial Court (SICC) has authorized to freeze about S$75 million ($58 million) in Bitcoin and USD Coin (USDC) in a crypto legal battle that has rolled on for years. The episode began after a customer received coins that were never meant for them because the unnamed exchange was looking at an outdated ledger when it initiated the transfer. 

Observers are now drawing parallels between this episode and the Bithumb customers who quickly withdrew tokens that were wrongfully sent to them after an employee error. 

The Singapore court granted an interim proprietary injunction on March 26 in the case listed on its eLitigation service as *DVA and another v DVC* [2026] SGHC(I) 4. International Judge David Goddard, who sat with High Court Justice Aidan Xu and International Judge Anthony Meagher, delivered the rulings. 

The claimants appear as DVA and DVB, the customer as DVC. 

How a Singapore exchange mistakenly sent tokens to a customer

The SICC documents did not name the crypto platform litigating the wrongful transfer case, only going as far as describing the claimant as one of the world’s largest digital-asset trading operations. But the judgment revealed that the customer has used the platform since around 2013, founded his own blockchain in 2016, and set up a cryptocurrency exchange of his own.

Apparently, the unnamed exchange discontinued support for its specialized self-custody wallet product in April 2018. However, users were not immediately cut off, as there was a period after the exchange wound the service could that they could still use a third-party open-source tool to access wallets.

As for how the wrongful transfer happened, the exchange’s systems continued to show that the customer named in the lawsuit still had 2,500 Bitcoin and 2,500 Bitcoin Cash in their specialized wallets when in fact, they had already emptied those accounts in March 2020. 

The first transfer, per court records, saw 2,500 BTC leave the wallet on March 2, 2020, landing in an account registered on a cryptocurrency exchange that the customer founded. 

The transfer of 2,500 BCH was initiated six days later. 250 of those coins went to Binance, ruling out the exchange as a potential claimant or defendant in this case.

The problem with these withdrawals was that the platform’s internal ledger just never logged them. Hence, the exchange continued to send reminders to the customer to move their tokens for up to four years after the actual withdrawals. 

A help offer from a relationship manager in June 2024 turned up an automated “remediation tool” in July that ended up with the exchange sending 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH of its own holdings to the customer in what appears as a classic double-spend incident. 

The platform clawed back the 1,700 BTC and 2,500 BCH in the customer’s wallet when it caught the mistake on January 29 2025. 

The customer has resisted the refund request on the missing balance, insisting on their claim to the disputed tokens as part of a defense strategy that disagrees with the platform’s version of events.

What the injunction covers, and what the judges withheld

The interim order bars the customer from selling, moving, or reducing the value of about 780 BTC and 816,773 USDC, along with any profits, interest, or assets derived from them. The court also ordered him to disclose where the disputed coins and their proceeds now sit, which matters because later transactions have made some of them hard to trace.

The judges did not give the platform everything. They refused, for now, to let it use that disclosure to chase similar freezes in other countries, leaving it to apply again later if needed.

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