Zipmex’s founder Marcus Lim refuses to resign – The Australian Financial Review

“Should this happen, my co-founder Akalarp [Yimwilai] and I have made it clear that we will fully cooperate with them and their wishes in the event they may be looking for a management change.”

Mr Lim’s tenure was thrown into question when reports emerged that a minority shareholder had sent an email calling for Mr Lim’s resignation.

But the Financial Review understands that at an extraordinary general meeting in Singapore last Thursday, no investor came forward to urge Mr Lim, or any of his management team, to resign.

Crypto winter

Zipmex is just one crypto-based business facing cascading solvency issues, thanks to highly levered trading strategies that were unwound quickly following a sharp market downturn. Thedefaults caused widespread contagion.

Over the weekend, fellow-Singaporean crypto lender Hodlnaut announced widespread layoffs pending “police proceedings”, after it sought protection from its creditors last week.

Like Zipmex, Hodlnaut froze withdrawals and had become the latest in a line of crypto lenders to have buckled under market pressure this year, with Celsius Network and Voyager Digital both filing for bankruptcy protection.

While it is unclear how Hodlnaut is caught up in the liquidity crunch, it hopes the Monetary Authority of Singapore will also grant it protection, like Zipmex.

Zipmex, which employs around 250 people across Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia, has five business units which have all been granted bankruptcy protection as well as protection from lawsuits until December 2.

Since freezing withdrawals in July, Zipmex allowed 60 per cent of its users to retrieve digital assets in the form of Ethereum, Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano and Ripple from their wallets.

While fresh capital is needed to plow liquidity back into the platform, Zipmex is just one of many creditors clamouring for their money lent to Babel Finance.

Babel Finance billed itself as a type of “crypto-bank” that would take customer deposits in return for a generous interest rate of sometimes up to 20 per cent.

Zipmex, through deposits in its ZipUp+ product, had on-lent $US69 million to Babel Finance with the express promise of returning as much as 10 per cent back to its depositors.

But earlier this month it emerged that Babel Finance had lost more than $US280 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum through unsupervised, unhedged proprietary trading strategies.

The Hong Kong-based business froze withdrawals in June and has since hired a restructuring specialist, Houlihan Lokey, in the United States.