Orionx closes after $7M goes missing — and the accused are its own founders
A Chilean exchange backed by Tether is shutting down for good. An audit found more than $7 million in customer crypto had left the wallets the company controlled — and withdrawals are frozen.
Orionx, a crypto exchange founded in Chile in 2017 and backed by stablecoin issuer Tether, said it has begun permanently closing after a forensic audit found more than $7 million in customer assets had moved to wallets it did not manage. Withdrawals are temporarily suspended. "Our sole priority now is to return as much of our clients' assets as possible," the company said in an announcement posted on X on Thursday.
The company is not blaming hackers. On Wednesday it filed a criminal complaint against two of its own co-founders, former executives Roberto Zibert and Joaquín Díaz, who it says had access to its crypto custody systems. Both deny the allegations, saying they never acted against customers' interests and that the cause of the shortfall remains unclear. The closure comes 15 months after Tether exclusively led Orionx's Series A round in June 2025.
Here is the part worth slowing down on. The gap was not found by a hacker alert or a chain sleuth on social media. According to the criminal complaint cited by Chilean newspaper La Tercera, chief operating officer Thomas Mac Millan noticed on Aug. 27 a "significant mismatch" between the balances shown in Orionx's own systems and the crypto actually sitting in custody. In other words: the number on the customer's screen and the coins in the wallet had stopped matching, and nobody noticed until someone compared the two by hand.
That is the whole lesson. A balance on an exchange app is a promise the company writes to itself. The audit compared Orionx's records with what could be verified onchain and found the recorded balances exceeded the assets actually held for Bitcoin, Ether, XRP and Polygon. The coins on the screen existed. The coins in the wallets, in part, did not.
An account balance is an IOU with a nice interface.
And the timeline makes it worse. The complaint reportedly alleges assets were moved out of Orionx's custody between 2018 and 2021 — years before the mismatch was spotted. If that holds up, people were logging in, seeing their money, and trading against a number that had been hollow for a long time. Orionx's own post did not say when the transfers happened or how the discrepancy first surfaced. Tether and Orionx did not respond to Cointelegraph's request for comment by publication.
Anyone in Chile, Peru, Colombia or Mexico who kept coins on Orionx — the platform grew from a retail exchange into payments and financial services across those four countries, so this is not only traders. It hits hardest the people with the first few thousand dollars of their life in crypto, the ones who picked a local exchange because it spoke their language and accepted their bank. And it lands on everyone who treats a big-name backer as a safety check: Tether led the funding round, and that told you nothing about where the coins were sitting.
Two things to watch. First, whether withdrawals — described by Orionx as "temporarily suspended" — actually reopen, and how much of the more than $7 million comes back; the company says returning client assets is now its only priority. Second, the criminal complaint filed Wednesday against Zibert and Díaz, who deny wrongdoing. Orionx has not published a timeline for either, and it did not say when the transfers occurred. Nobody has named a date.
The mismatch dates back, per the complaint, to 2018–2021. Orionx raised its Series A in June 2025 — money went in years after the coins allegedly went out. If a funding round with due diligence didn't catch it, what exactly do the rest of us think we're checking when we pick an exchange?
Sources: Cointelegraph, "Tether-backed Orionx to shut down after audit flags $7M custody gap," Sep 6, 2026; Orionx statement on X; La Tercera reporting on the company's criminal complaint.
Биржа с инвестициями Tether закрывается, потому что аудит не нашёл $7 млн клиентских денег — вывод средств остановлен, а обвиняют собственных основателей: напоминание, что деньги на бирже — не ваши деньги.
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