Singapore freezes $58M after an exchange paid out the same 2,500 BTC twice

A Singapore court has frozen roughly S$75 million ($58 million) of bitcoin and USD Coin belonging to a long-standing customer of an unnamed crypto platform, after the platform said a ledger error caused it to transfer him 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH in July 2024 ^[1][2]. The consequential detail is not the size of the freeze but the order of operations: the exchange recovered most of the assets by itself, then asked a court for what had already left its custody ^[12][14].

According to Cryptopolitan's account of the judgment, the Singapore International Commercial Court granted an interim proprietary injunction on March 26 in a matter listed as DVA and another v DVC [2026] SGHC(I) 4, with International Judge David Goddard delivering the rulings alongside High Court Justice Aidan Xu and International Judge Anthony Meagher ^[3][4]. The claimants are anonymised as DVA and DVB and the customer as DVC; the platform is described only as one of the world's largest digital-asset trading operations ^[5]. The customer has used it since around 2013, founded his own blockchain in 2016 and set up his own exchange ^[6].

The failure was mundane. The platform discontinued a specialised self-custody wallet product in April 2018, leaving users a window in which a third-party open-source tool could still reach the wallets ^[7]. The customer emptied his in March 2020: 2,500 BTC moved out on 2 March into an account at the exchange he founded, with 2,500 BCH following six days later, 250 of which went to Binance, which is neither claimant nor defendant ^[9]. The platform's internal ledger never recorded any of it, so its systems kept showing the balances and it kept sending reminders to move the coins for up to four years ^[8][10]. In June 2024 a relationship manager offered help; in July an automated "remediation tool" sent 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH of the platform's own holdings to the customer ^[11]. That is roughly four years and four months of unreconciled state ending in a payout ^[19].

The platform caught it on 29 January 2025 and clawed back 1,700 BTC and 2,500 BCH sitting in the customer's wallet ^[12]. That leaves about 800 BTC unrecovered by self-help, and the injunction covers about 780 BTC and 816,773 USDC, or some 97.5 percent of the gap ^[20]. The order bars the customer from selling, moving or diminishing those assets and any profits or assets derived from them, and requires him to disclose where the coins and proceeds now sit, since later transactions have made some hard to trace ^[14][15]. He has resisted the refund demand and disputes the platform's version of events ^[13]. On the reported figures the S$75 million valuation implies roughly $73,300 per bitcoin ^[21].

Cryptopolitan frames the case as a possible precedent on whether courts can reverse mistaken crypto transfers, and draws a parallel to Bithumb customers who withdrew tokens sent to them in error ^[17][18]. Read narrowly, what exists so far is a preservation order, not a reversal: the judges declined for now to let the platform use the disclosure to pursue equivalent freezes in other jurisdictions, leaving it to apply again ^[16].

Watch three things. Whether the platform returns for that cross-border extension, which is where the doctrine actually gets tested ^[16]. Whether the disclosure order locates the untraceable proceeds, because an injunction over assets nobody can find is decoration ^[15]. And whether four years of reminders against an unreconciled ledger becomes the customer's strongest argument rather than the platform's ^[10][13].