Chilean crypto exchange Orionx is permanently shutting down after an audit found more than $7 million in missing assets. The exchange took investment from Tether just 15 months ago. The company has already filed a criminal complaint against two former co-founders.
What happened
Orionx, a Chilean crypto exchange, announced the start of a permanent closure process. The trigger was a review by independent forensic auditors, which found a gap between the balances recorded in the company's systems and the actual assets held at its custody addresses. The gap exceeded $7 million. The company announced the closure in an official statement on X on Thursday, September 3. Client withdrawals remain temporarily suspended, and the company has not given a date for resuming operations. It is still unclear whether customers will get their assets back in full or only in part.
The closure comes 15 months after Tether led Orionx's Series A funding round as part of its push to expand digital asset adoption in Latin America. The deal was part of Tether's broader push to promote USDT usage across Latin America, where stablecoins are often used to protect savings from local currency devaluation. Founded in Chile in 2017, Orionx later expanded into Peru, Colombia and Mexico, offering crypto payment and financial services to retail customers across the region. An archived version of Tether's announcement about the investment has since been removed from Tether's own website, though the June 2025 deal itself is confirmed by other sources.
What the audit found
The internal review began on August 27, when Orionx chief operating officer Thomas Mac Millan spotted a significant mismatch between the balances in the company's internal systems and the assets actually held in custody. The company then brought in outside specialists, who compared internal records against onchain data. That method checks whether every unit of crypto recorded on a customer's balance is actually sitting in a wallet the exchange controls. The audit found that recorded balances exceeded the real assets held at custody addresses for several cryptocurrencies. According to the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, which cited the text of the company's criminal complaint, Orionx conducted the 2025 review of its operations specifically as part of complying with Chile's Fintech Law, and that is when it brought in the financial professionals who later helped uncover the gap. The review covered several years of the company's historical data rather than just the recent months, which is what made it possible to find transfers dating back to 2018-2021.
Criminal case against the co-founders
On Wednesday, September 2, Orionx filed a criminal complaint against two former co-founders, Roberto Zibert and Joaquin Diaz. According to the company, both had been among Orionx's founders since 2017 and had technical access to its crypto custody systems the entire time. The complaint alleges that assets were moved out of Orionx's control between 2018 and 2021, including to accounts on other crypto platforms.
According to the complaint, an account linked to Diaz received more than $1.5 million across 14 transfers. Another wallet allegedly received 187 ETH, more than 4.1 million USDT and 200,000 USDC from Orionx. Zibert and Diaz deny the allegations and say they never acted against customers' interests. According to them, the actual cause of the shortfall remains unclear. Cases like this over custody discrepancies usually drag on for months, since investigators need to reconstruct years of onchain transaction history. It is not yet clear whether Chilean law enforcement has gained access to the wallets tied to the named suspects, or whether any of the transferred funds can be frozen.
What happens to customers
In its statement, Orionx named returning client assets its main priority for the coming period.
"Our sole priority now is to return as much of our clients' assets as possible."
- Orionx, official statement on X, September 3, 2026
The company said withdrawals remain suspended while the closure process continues. Orionx has not disclosed exactly when the $7 million in transfers took place or how the gap was first spotted, beyond mentioning an internal review tied to Chile's Fintech Law. For customers of exchanges going through this kind of closure, the usual advice is simple: watch the company's official channels and do not trust third parties promising a faster refund. In a region where crypto payments are often used as an alternative to unstable local currencies, the collapse of a player like Orionx could temporarily shake user trust in smaller local exchanges. The Orionx case is a reminder of why exchanges need to regularly reconcile internal balances against onchain data instead of relying only on their own bookkeeping, since that kind of check is exactly what exposed the problem this time. Cointelegraph contacted Tether and Orionx for comment but had not received a response by publication.
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