The International Commercial Court of Singapore has recently issued an interim injunction in respect of a dispute concerning the attribution of encrypted assets, freezing bitcoin and US$ 75 million. The case arose from a large digital asset trading platform alleging errors in the internal books of account, which resulted in the transfer of 2,500 bitcoin and 2,500 bitcoin cash to a wallet controlled by a long-term client.
Court freezes disputed assets.
According to court documents, the injunction covered approximately 780 bitcoin and over 817,000 USDCs, as well as proceeds, profits and interest derived from these assets. At the same time, the court required the defendant to disclose the current location of the assets and their realization proceeds.
This order is an interim property protection measure that restricts the defendant from disposing of, transferring or reducing the value of the assets in question. The Court granted the application after the hearing on 26 March this year.
The starting point is the old wallet.
The core of the case involved a category of self-hosted wallet products introduced in the early years. The court judgement indicated that such wallets required the client to hold key security documents. The Platform stopped supporting the product in April 2018, but the client was able to continue to access it through the open source tool.
By March 2020, 2,500 bitcoins and 2,500 bitcoins had been transferred out of the wallet, and the wallet was virtually empty. On the platform side, it was stated that due to technical problems, the transfer was not correctly recorded in the internal books, so that the system still showed that this portion of the balance remained in the name of the client for many years.
The platform then retransferd 2,500 bitcoin and 2,500 bitcoin cash to other accounts of the client in July 2024, based on this set of books. According to the Platform, this portion of the assets came from its comprehensive hosting wallet, and the transfer was due only to an internal system error showing that the client still had the corresponding balance.
Clients have transferred 780 bitcoins
Court records show that the defendant transferred part of the encrypted money out of the platform after receiving the relevant assets. On 13 July 2024, 20 bitcoins were converted to approximately 816773 USDCs and transferred to non-host wallets.
From July 2024 to January 2025, the accused transferred 780 bitcoins in batches to various external addresses. According to the Platform, the movement on the follow-up chain makes it more difficult to trace the current location of some of the assets.
Following the discovery of the problem in January 2025, the Platform frozen 1,700 bitcoin and all 2,500 bitcoin cash that had not been transferred from the client ' s account and re-recorded this part of the asset back to its own account. For 780 bitcoin and over 81.77 million USDCs that had been transferred out of the platform, the platform requested to be returned, but was refused.
The two sides clashed around the attribution of assets.
The Platform has presented in its pleadings a number of grounds for action, including improper enrichment, property rights claims, fraudulent or negligent misrepresentations, and breach of a service contract for the Platform, and has requested the court to confirm that the defendant holds the disputed assets and that they should be returned.
The defendant denied the Platform ' s assertion that the assets in question belonged to itself and counter-claimed for the return of assets still frozen inside the Platform or the payment of equivalent compensation. It was also stated that the Platform ' s recognition of errors in internal books weakened its claim for transfer to asset attribution in 2024.
The court found that there was a substantive dispute.
In the interim, the three judges considered that whether the Platform retained property rights over the assets in dispute constituted at least a serious issue to be considered. The court accordingly granted the freezing order in order to prevent the transfer of the assets in question from continuing until the formal hearing.
The case also shows that Singapore courts have been continuously involved in high-value encryption disputes in recent years and that issues related to trading platforms, asset recovery and cross-border preservation are increasing.