Poolin files Chapter 11, owes $163.7M to 11,700 wallet users

Poolin Technology Pte. Ltd. and two affiliated companies filed voluntary Chapter 11 petitions in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on July 22. The cases are being jointly administered under case number 26-18325.

The filings list $163,723,500 in unsecured IOUs to roughly 11,700 wallet users and combined prepetition liabilities of about $173,109,791. Poolin Technology reports about $1.2 million in a New Jersey bank account, an office lease and an intercompany claim. The Texas mining sites, power rights and most equipment are held by Lonestar Taproot LLC and Lonestar Dream Inc.

The Lonestar affiliates have signed opening bids for Texas assets that total $52 million. Thor CALAP LLC agreed to serve as a stalking-horse buyer with a $15 million offer for Pyote assets and a $37 million offer for Tarbush-related assets. Those offers equal roughly 31.8% of the wallet IOUs in simple arithmetic, but they apply to assets held by the Lonestar companies rather than cash in Poolin Technology’s wallet business.

The debtors’ proposed sale motion would transfer existing liens to sale proceeds and preserve lien priority. The stalking-horse agreements include a 3% breakup fee for each contract and expense reimbursement caps of $250,000 for Tarbush and $150,000 for Pyote. The motion seeks administrative-expense treatment for those protections.

If the court approves the timetable in the motion, the debtors propose a Sept. 8 deadline for qualified offers, a Sept. 10 auction if multiple bidders qualify, a sale hearing by Sept. 16 and a closing deadline of Nov. 30. A first-day hearing was scheduled for July 27.

The filings say the wallet liabilities stem from a lending and deposit business that accepted stablecoin loans against customer crypto and offered deposit products with advertised returns of about 2% to 8.8% annually. When Bitcoin fell below $20,000 in June 2022, pledged collateral declined and triggered margin calls. Poolin shifted financing to Antalpha Technologies and used financing proceeds for customer withdrawals, interest payments, mining equipment purchases, U.S. expansion and operations. By September 2022, Poolin suspended withdrawals and issued the IOUs now listed as unsecured claims.

The filings state Antalpha liquidated about $265 million of digital-asset collateral in November 2022 against roughly $260 million due. Poolin then stopped ordinary-course operations while the Texas mining expansion continued to incur losses. The Lonestar program had been designed for up to 600 megawatts of power but initially secured only about 100 MW, leaving more rigs than deployable power. The debtors recorded around $8.8 million in equipment-sale losses over fiscal 2023–2025 and about $45.9 million of cumulative Lonestar losses.

The debtors say they contacted more than 335 strategic, financial and hybrid prospects, resulting in 28 nondisclosure agreements, seven letters of intent and three additional indications of auction interest. Potential buyers include cryptocurrency miners and operators of AI or high-performance computing data centers because powered land, grid interconnections and substations can have value beyond Bitcoin mining.

How much wallet holders recover will depend on final sales proceeds, the resolution of intercompany claims and liens, administrative and priority expenses, and allowed unsecured claims. The stalking-horse agreements set opening floors but do not provide a reliable recovery estimate; the court process and sale outcomes will determine any distributions to unsecured wallet creditors.