Zondacrypto: Poland's Biggest Crypto Exchange, a $650M Hole and a Bitcoin Vault Nobody Can Open

On 6 April 2026 the Polish news site money.pl published numbers that the country's largest cryptocurrency exchange could not explain away. Recoveris, a firm that traces lost crypto, had looked at the public wallets of Zondacrypto and found that the bitcoin it kept on hand for customer withdrawals had fallen from about 55.7 coins in August 2024 to 0.18 in March 2026. A drop of 99.7%. Within days more than 25,000 customers asked for their money back. Most of them never got it.

Zondacrypto, known until 2021 as BitBay, had more than a million registered accounts and was the biggest crypto exchange in Poland and one of the biggest in Central and Eastern Europe. It sponsored the Polish Olympic team, a professional cycling team and a conservative political conference. By the end of August its operating company was bankrupt in Estonia, with debts of about €432 million and assets of about €167,000. Investigators, according to the Polish news portal Onet, now put customer losses at no less than 2.4 billion zloty, roughly $650 million.

At the centre of it sits a vault of 4,503 bitcoin, worth about $330 million in April. The exchange's chief executive says the only person who could open it is the company's founder. That founder has been missing for four and a half years.

The exchange and the missing founder

A crypto exchange works like an online stockbroker. Customers send in ordinary money, here mostly Polish zloty, and buy digital coins such as bitcoin. The exchange holds the coins for them, the same way a broker holds shares in a customer's name. Most exchanges keep a small amount of coins in a "hot wallet", connected to the internet and used for daily withdrawals, like the cash drawer in a shop. The rest sits in a "cold wallet", kept offline, like the safe in the back room. What opens either one is a private key: a long secret code. Whoever has the code controls the coins. Lose it, and the coins stay where they are forever.

Sylwester Suszek founded BitBay in Katowice in 2014 with Mateusz Bajer and Jacek Rogóż. In 2021, after a change of ownership, the business was renamed Zonda and then Zondacrypto, run from Estonia through a company called BB Trade Estonia OÜ, and Przemysław Kral became chief executive. On 10 March 2022 Suszek drove to a business meeting in Czeladź, a town in Silesia, and has not been seen since. No body has been found and no one has been charged with harming him. His fate is unknown.

©Photo: SkrytkaSchowek, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On 16 April 2026, with withdrawals stuck and customers angry, Kral posted that the exchange had some 4,500 bitcoin and so was not insolvent. He then confirmed that the exchange could not reach those coins: the cold wallet had been set up by Suszek, he said, and Suszek never handed over the keys. In a video statement Kral denied taking customer money and said he wanted Suszek found more than anyone. The obvious question, which prosecutors are now asking, is why an exchange that had no access to its largest reserve since 2022 went on taking deposits for four more years without telling customers.

Withdrawals stop, and everyone leaves

The rest came quickly. Kral was reported to have left Poland around mid April; Polish and crypto media placed him in Israel, where he holds citizenship, and later in the Persian Gulf. On 17 April the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Katowice opened an investigation into fraud on a large scale and money laundering. Within days it had identified several hundred possible victims and at least 350 million zloty, about $96 million, of losses, according to Notes from Poland. All three members of the exchange's supervisory board, Veronika Togo, Guido Buehler and Georgi Džaniašvili, resigned, citing "material inconsistencies" and doubts about whether customer assets existed. The website went dark on 23 April.

Estonia's Financial Intelligence Unit, the regulator that had licensed the business, revoked BB Trade Estonia's licence on 29 June. On 27 August the Harju County Court in Tallinn declared the company bankrupt. The bankruptcy trustee counted liabilities of €431.9 million against €167,000 of assets: debts about 2,500 times bigger than anything left to pay them. Customers have until 27 October 2026 to file claims, and early tallies of those claims run above €700 million.

©CMZ chart. Data: Harju County Court trustee

Where the money went, according to prosecutors

The estimate has grown sevenfold. The prosecutors' formal figure is still "at least 350 million zloty", but according to Onet, reported by Cointelegraph on 24 August, investigators now estimate customer losses at 2.4 billion zloty or more. Their working theory, as reported, is that Zondacrypto used only part of what customers paid in to actually buy crypto and moved the rest to private accounts. In plain terms: customers saw coins in their accounts, but many of those coins may never have been bought.

The same Onet report said Kral had been charged with large-scale fraud and was cooperating with prosecutors in the hope of a lighter sentence, after months of informal meetings in Poland, Sicily and the Gulf. Prosecutors have not said publicly what he is charged with. On 28 September the Prosecutor General, Waldemar Żurek, said Kral does not have formal crown witness status, the Polish version of a plea deal for testimony. Kral has not been convicted of anything.

Others have been charged. On 2 September police and the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau detained three people. Anna P. and Jaromira W. are charged with taking part in an organised criminal group that aimed to take over parts of Suszek's assets and with damaging BB Trade Estonia. Prosecutors allege Jaromira W. took out almost 8 million zloty to buy property in France and laundered 7.5 million zloty through fake property deals, and that Anna P. obstructed the investigation into Suszek's disappearance, including by removing surveillance equipment from the place he was last seen. Rafał Z., a businessman and trader, is charged with misappropriating 1.7 million zloty. A court remanded all three for three months on 4 September. On 7 September Roman Ż., a long-time associate of Suszek, was charged with computer fraud that allegedly took at least 7.8 million zloty of customer money. None has been convicted.

The Olympic chief and the politics

Zondacrypto spent heavily on being seen. It was a major sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee, paid for adverts worth a reported 37 million zloty on the right-wing broadcaster Telewizja Republika, sponsored CPAC Poland, the Polish edition of the American conservative conference, and gave money to a foundation linked to the former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who confirmed receiving 450,000 zloty.

On 27 August, the same day as the bankruptcy, the Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime detained Radosław Piesiewicz, president of the Polish Olympic Committee, in Warsaw. He is charged with paid influence peddling and with favouring some creditors over others as the exchange slid towards insolvency. Media reports said Kral bought him a Patek Philippe watch worth €40,000 as he offered to help with the exchange's problems at UOKiK, Poland's consumer protection office. Piesiewicz denies it and says he paid for the watch himself. UOKiK's president said no one intervened. A Katowice court remanded him for three months.

The scandal landed in the middle of a long fight over crypto rules. Poland is the only EU country without a regulator for the bloc's crypto law, known as MiCA, because President Karol Nawrocki has vetoed the government's bill three times, calling it too restrictive. Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government says the opposition's ties to Zondacrypto explain the blocking; the opposition denies it. On 4 September the Sejm voted 241 to 198 to overturn the third veto, 25 votes short of the three-fifths majority needed. It failed. On 1 October a seven-person team at the National Prosecutor's Office, led by Marek Wełna, took over both the Zondacrypto case and the investigation into Suszek's disappearance, which had already been merged.