Tether-Backed Orionx Shuts Down in Chile After $7 Million Client Asset Shortfall, Sues Its Own Co-Founders

Orionx, a Santiago-based crypto exchange that Tether backed just 15 months ago, is dead. The company announced on September 3 that it's shutting down for good after a forensic audit found a gap of more than $7 million between what customer accounts said they held and what was actually sitting in the exchange's custody wallets, according to a company statement shared on X and reported by TradingView. Withdrawals are frozen. More than 100,000 registered users are stuck waiting.

On August 27, Orionx chief operating officer Thomas Mac Millan flagged what the company's own criminal complaint calls a "significant mismatch" between internal balances and blockchain-verifiable custody addresses, according to TradingView's reporting on the complaint. An internal review turned into an external forensic audit. The audit compared Orionx's books against on-chain data for Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and Polygon's POL token and found the shortfall was real.

Crowdfund Insider reports the more granular number from that specific four-coin review came in at roughly $6.06 million, with Orionx cautioning the total could grow as investigators check other cryptocurrencies. The company has settled on "more than $7 million" as its working figure.

Orionx is suing the people who built it

On September 2, one day before going public with the shutdown, Orionx filed a criminal complaint with Chile's Public Prosecutor's Office against its own co-founders, Joaquín Díaz and Roberto Zibert, according to Crypto Briefing and BigGo Finance. Díaz previously ran the company's technology; Zibert was general manager. The complaint alleges unfair administration and claims the disputed transfers happened between 2018 and 2021, moving assets to wallets outside the company's control, some allegedly ending up on other crypto platforms.

The complaint gets specific. Citing Chilean newspaper La Tercera, TradingView reports an account tied to Díaz allegedly received more than $1.5 million across 14 separate transfers, while another wallet allegedly took in 187 Ether, over 4.1 million USDT and 200,000 USDC pulled from Orionx's custody. These are allegations in a filed complaint, not findings of a court. Both Díaz and Zibert have denied wrongdoing, telling reporters they never acted against customer interests and that the actual cause of the shortfall "remains unresolved," per BigGo Finance.

Chile's regulator says it never approved this exchange

Chile's Financial Market Commission, the CMF, confirmed on September 4 that it rejected Orionx's license application under the country's Fintech Law back on June 19, 2026, according to KuCoin News and Crowdfund Insider. Orionx operated for roughly nine years serving customers in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico without ever being formally supervised by Chilean financial authorities. The CMF told users it has no authority to order the return of their funds and advised them to preserve their records and consider legal action on their own.

Chile's Fintech Law is relatively new, and operating before or outside a licensing regime that only recently came into force isn't necessarily evidence of intent to evade oversight. Plenty of crypto platforms globally have operated in regulatory gray zones simply because the rules hadn't caught up yet, not because they were dodging scrutiny. But the practical result here is 100,000-plus users with no regulatory backstop and a company now admitting it can't guarantee full recovery.

Tether's silence

Tether led Orionx's Series A round exclusively in June 2025, a deal the stablecoin issuer publicly framed as advancing "financial inclusion" in Latin America, according to onebullex, citing Yahoo Finance's reporting on the original investment. That announcement has since vanished from Tether's website. Onebullex, citing Protos, notes the deletion happened after the audit's findings became public. Cointelegraph, whose reporting TradingView draws on, says it contacted both Tether and Orionx for comment and had not received a response as of publication.

Orionx says a phased restitution plan is already in its earliest stage and has been shared with authorities, but the company has been explicit it cannot promise clients will get everything back. The criminal investigation by Chile's Public Prosecutor's Office is now the mechanism that will determine whether Díaz, Zibert, or anyone else is held liable, and whether any of the missing $7 million-plus can actually be traced and recovered. None of that has happened yet.