Orionx: Chile's Tether-Backed Exchange Closed Over a $7M Hole and Accused Its Own Founders

On Thursday 3 September 2026, customers of Orionx, one of Chile's oldest crypto exchanges, opened their accounts and found a message instead of a withdraw button. The company was closing for good. Withdrawals were "temporarily suspended". An audit, it said, had found that more than $7 million of the crypto it held for customers had been moved to wallets the company did not control. "Our sole priority now is to return as much of our clients' assets as possible," Orionx said. It made no promise that anyone would get all of it back.

The day before, Orionx had filed a criminal complaint in Santiago against two of its own founders: Roberto Zibert, its former general manager, and Joaquín Díaz, its former technology manager. Both men deny wrongdoing. Neither has been charged by prosecutors or convicted of anything. Six weeks later, on 14 October, the company asked a Santiago court to put it into liquidation, Chile's version of a company bankruptcy, listing debts of about 19.1 billion Chilean pesos, roughly $20 million.

The exchange says it had more than 100,000 registered users. Fifteen months before the collapse, in June 2025, it had been picked as a growth bet by Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin.

An exchange built by two students

A crypto exchange works like an online stockbroker. Customers send in ordinary money, here mostly Chilean pesos, buy digital coins such as bitcoin, and usually leave them with the exchange, the way shares sit in a brokerage account. That arrangement is called custody. The customer sees a balance on a screen; the exchange holds the actual coins in its own wallets, the digital equivalent of a vault.

Orionx began in 2016 and 2017 as a university project. Zibert and Díaz, both now 32, met studying computer engineering at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, La Tercera reported. Joel Vainstein, an industrial engineer, joined as a co-founder in 2017 and ran the over-the-counter desk, which arranges large trades privately for big clients and was the firm's main business. In April 2018 Chilean banks closed the accounts of Orionx and other local exchanges, and the firm took the banks to Chile's competition court, the Tribunal de Defensa de la Libre Competencia. Orionx went on to serve customers in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico.

In June 2025 Tether announced it had led, and closed, Orionx's Series A, a company's first big round of outside investment. Tether issues USDT, a stablecoin, a token meant to be worth exactly one US dollar, like a digital dollar bill. "By closing Orionx's series A round, we are not only supporting a high-impact company," said Paolo Ardoino, Tether's chief executive, presenting the deal as part of a push into Latin American payments. Neither side disclosed the amount at the time; La Tercera later reported it was $4 million in cash. Tether's announcement has since disappeared from its website, Cointelegraph noted. Tether did not respond to Cointelegraph's request for comment, and no public statement from Tether on the closure has been found.

How the hole was found

The trouble surfaced through paperwork. Chile's Fintech Law requires crypto firms to register with the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero (CMF), the national financial regulator. Vainstein became general manager on 15 January 2025, and the clean-up that came with the application process turned up the problem. On 27 August 2025, according to the company's complaint, operations manager Thomas Mac Millan found a "significant mismatch" between the balances in Orionx's records and the coins actually sitting in its custody wallets.

At a board meeting on 27 October 2025, according to Zibert, it was Díaz who read out a preliminary report on the mismatch. A forensic audit by Deloitte, one of the Big Four accounting firms, began that day, and in November an internal committee put the possible gap at about $13 million. The audit ran for about six months and put the shortfall at $6,982,643, in four coins: bitcoin ($3.93 million), ether ($2.29 million), XRP ($762,000) and Polygon's POL ($201). In plain terms, customers' screens showed more coins than the vault held. Diario Financiero, citing people familiar with the audit, said it found not accounting errors but a systematic pattern of transfers made without the company's knowledge, and that some of the money was used for leveraged futures trading on outside platforms, bets made with borrowed money, without clients knowing.

©CMZ chart. Data: Deloitte report via Diario Financiero and La Tercera

Meanwhile the regulator said no. On 19 June 2026 the CMF rejected Orionx's application for registration. From then on it could only wind down existing business, not take new customers.

What the complaint alleges

The complaint, filed on 2 September in Santiago's 4th Juzgado de Garantía, accuses Zibert and Díaz of administración desleal, roughly breach of fiduciary duty: managing other people's assets against their interests. It says both men built the system and held the privileged access needed to move coins out of custody. The details below are Orionx's allegations, as reported by La Tercera, BioBioChile and Diario Financiero. None has been tested in court.

It says a Binance account labelled "Binance Joaco", which it links to Díaz, received more than $1.5 million from Orionx in 14 transfers with no business reason. Díaz has said the account was his and that a former employee also used it, La Tercera reported. It says 79 bitcoin left company custody through a commissions account and a personal account of Zibert's at Celsius, a crypto lender that collapsed in 2022, although Orionx never had a corporate Celsius account. It says Orionx's cold wallet, the offline vault, sent 187 ether, 4,146,643 USDT and 200,000 USDC, another digital dollar, to wallets labelled with a Zibert family name and a company called Incremental. Most of the movements are dated between 2018 and 2022. A transfer to a labelled wallet does not by itself show who controlled it, crypto.news pointed out.

The company asked prosecutors to have the PDI, Chile's investigative police, question both men as suspects, to lift bank secrecy on their accounts and on companies they hold stakes in, and to ask Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit and other exchanges for records. It also asked for the return of system keys for its Fireblocks custody service, Amazon Web Services and Google Workspace, and two laptops. Prosecutor Camila López of the Fiscalía de Investigación Especializada Oriente leads the case, which is confidential.

The founders' answer

In a joint statement reported by Chilevisión on 4 September, Zibert and Díaz said: "Rechazamos categóricamente los cargos que se nos imputan." We categorically reject the charges against us. They said there was still no certainty about the cause of the accounting gap. Speaking to La Tercera's Pulso on 13 September, Zibert called Deloitte's report "totally incomplete" and said its scope expressly left out the area run by Vainstein. He said it could not separate client money from company money in shared accounts and "does not attribute the execution of those operations to us, and we did not benefit from them." Díaz said they had cooperated "from day one". Zibert also said the board had refused their requests to call meetings and that crucial information had been kept from them.

Clients have not waited. By 29 September six criminal actions had been filed against the founders, La Tercera reported: the company's own and five more, most of them from customers. Some customers also named Vainstein, now chief executive. One, René Castañón, puts his losses at about 255 million pesos. Another, Sergio Zerené, says he deposited 20,001 XRP in November 2021, worth about 26.5 million pesos by his own estimate. Vainstein has not been charged either.