The SICC froze roughly 780 Bitcoin and 816,773 USDC after a platform’s automated tool sent replacement tokens to a customer who had emptied his wallet four years earlier. The court ordered the customer to disclose where the coins sit now.
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The Singapore International Commercial Court froze roughly S$75 million ($58 million) in Bitcoin and USD Coin on March 26, siding with a crypto exchange that accidentally sent replacement tokens to a customer years after he emptied his wallet.
The interim proprietary injunction covers about 780 Bitcoin and 816,773 USDC, plus any profits or assets derived from them. The court also ordered the customer to disclose where the disputed coins and their proceeds now sit, since later transactions have made some of them hard to trace.
The case, listed as DVA and another v DVC [2026] SGHC(I) 4, pits two platform companies against a customer anonymized as DVC. International Judge David Goddard, High Court Justice Aidan Xu, and International Judge Anthony Meagher delivered the ruling. The exchange itself is not named in court documents, which describe it only as one of the world’s largest digital-asset trading operations.
The dispute traces back to 2020. Court records show the customer emptied his specialized self-custody wallets on March 2, 2020, moving 2,500 Bitcoin to an account on a cryptocurrency exchange he had founded. Six days later, 2,500 Bitcoin Cash followed, with 250 of those coins landing at Binance – a detail that appears to rule out Binance as a party to the case.
The platform had discontinued its self-custody wallet product in April 2018. Users could still access their funds through a third-party open-source tool. The exchange’s internal ledger never logged the 2020 withdrawals. For the next four years, the system continued to show 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH in the customer’s accounts, triggering automated reminders to move the tokens.
The error became a real problem in June 2024. A relationship manager offered help, leading to an automated “remediation tool” in July that transferred replacement coins – 2,500 BTC and 2,500 BCH from the exchange’s own holdings – to the customer. Court documents describe it as a classic double-spend incident.
The exchange caught the mistake on January 29, 2025, and clawed back 1,700 BTC and 2,500 BCH from the customer’s wallet. The customer refused to return the remaining balance, arguing that he has a legitimate claim to the disputed tokens. His defense disputes the platform’s version of events.
The judges did not give the platform everything they wanted. They refused, for now, to let the exchange use the disclosure order to pursue similar freezes in other countries. The platform can apply again later if needed.
A ledger error that went undetected for four years wound up costing a major trading platform millions in misplaced crypto. The legal fight over who gets the remaining 780 Bitcoin is far from over. The next hearing date has not been set.
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