Poolin Technology, the Singapore-based company that once mined more Bitcoin than any other pool on earth, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 22 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey. The filing, first detailed in Decrypt’s report, covers Poolin alongside two U.S. affiliates, Lonestar Dream Inc. and Lonestar Taproot LLC, and lists prepetition obligations of more than $100 million against less than $10 million in assets.
The headline number is grimmer than that ratio suggests. The single largest debt — $163.7 million — is owed to roughly 11,700 ordinary users whose funds have been frozen since September 2022, according to a court declaration from Chief Restructuring Officer Michael DuFrayne. CoinDesk puts total debts at around $173 million.
Image credit: Shutterstock, via Decrypt.
From a fifth of the network to zero
Poolin was founded in Beijing in 2017 by Zhibiao “Kevin” Pan, Fa Zhu and Tianzhao Li — all veterans of mining-hardware maker Bitmain. By 2019 it was widely regarded as the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, with Glassnode data showing an 18–20% share of global hashrate. A mining pool aggregates the computing power of individual miners so the group wins block rewards more consistently than any single participant could alone; at its peak, more Bitcoin flowed through Poolin than through any other single pool.
The company’s fatal turn was not mining itself but the shadow-banking business it bolted on top. Through Poolin Wallet, the pool offered interest-bearing accounts — effectively taking customer deposits and lending them out. When the 2022 market crash triggered a wave of withdrawal demand, Poolin froze Poolin Wallet and Pool Account withdrawals in September of that year, saying it was “facing some liquidity issues.” Co-founder Kevin Pan acknowledged the liquidity problems in a WeChat post while insisting user funds were safe.
Instead of making customers whole, Poolin issued IOU tokens as placeholders for real Bitcoin. Those IOUs were never redeemed, and they now form the core of the bankruptcy’s creditor list. Poolin’s share of global hashrate has been effectively zero for years.
The recovery math
Chapter 11 is the U.S. process that lets a company operate under court supervision while it reorganizes or sells assets. In Poolin’s case there is little left to reorganize: its Texas mining and hosting operations, run through Lonestar Dream, shut down entirely on July 10, and the company says it does not intend to resume them.
What remains is an auction. Thor CALAP LLC has placed a $52 million stalking-horse bid for Poolin’s two West Texas mining sites — an opening offer that sets the floor other bidders must beat in a court-supervised sale. That $52 million covers physical mining infrastructure only, not frozen wallet balances, and it is the only meaningful recovery currently on the table for creditors owed roughly $173 million.
The Texas operations were themselves a money pit. Court filings show the sites accumulated roughly $45.9 million in losses since opening, plus another $8.8 million lost selling equipment at discounted prices between fiscal 2023 and 2025. The Texas expansion was the bet Pan had made to rebuild the business after the freeze; grid-connection approvals stalled, and the rebuild never came.
Why this matters beyond nostalgia
Poolin’s collapse is the last major unresolved casualty of crypto’s 2022 liquidity contagion finally reaching a courtroom — nearly four years after customer funds froze. The pattern it completes is instructive: the mining pools and platforms that failed were almost uniformly the ones that quietly became custodial lenders, using deposits to fund yield products and expansion. Pools that stuck to coordinating hashrate for a fee are still operating.
For the 11,700 IOU holders, the arithmetic is stark. Even if the Texas auction clears well above the $52 million floor, proceeds must first fund the estate’s administration before flowing to creditors — and $163.7 million in customer claims sits in a queue against a company that reported under $10 million in assets. Recovery, when it comes, will be measured in cents on the dollar, and it will have taken the better part of a decade to arrive.
Poolin did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.
