Beating the Odds? Insolvent FCoin To Resume Operations And Attempt to Refund Users

After revealing it had become insolvent and unable to pay its customers an estimated 13,000 BTC (approximately $115 million at current market price), FCoin exchange has officially announced that they are preparing to restart their operations while promising to make refunds to affected users.  

FCoin To Compensate Users

As per the announcement on the exchange’s support website today, the company’s existing team will make efforts to resume the operation of both the FCoin and FMex websites as soon as possible. At the time of writing, the exchange is manually approving withdrawal requests for some users who followed specific procedures.

Once the sites have been restored, the team would hand them over to a temporary committee called the Community Transitional Provisional Commission (ICPC) until the refund plan is complete. The ICPC is an interim committee that consists of members of the current Social Council and community representatives 

FCoin did not clearly state how or when it will start to repay customers that were affected by the insolvency. However, the exchange said that the community would formulate a plan to compensate the users at the earliest moment possible. 

“Led by the ICSC, the current user’s asset-to-debt or equity-sharing plan will be formulated as soon as possible and announced to the community.” 

The above statement hints that part of the exchange’s compensation plan may be to award the affected customers equity in the company or some form of creditor’s rights. 

The exchange also added that the control of FCoin would be transferred to the community once the payment plan is complete. 

“The future follow-up operation of the website will be completely dominated by the community after the end of the transition period, and the specific form will be led by the Provisional Commission and further agreed with the community,” the site reads. 

Beating The Odds

FCoin’s founder, Zhang Jian, first announced the exchange’s insolvency on Feb 17, saying that it was due to “data decision error.” However, reports from an on-chain analysis firm, PeckShield, showed that FCoin’s insolvency started just two months after the platform launched in 2018.

While FCoin did not provide enough details on its plans to resume operations and refund users, the exchange’s effort will be commendable if they succeed; not many trading platforms have been able to achieve such feat in the cryptocurrency industry.