Crypto currency exchange platform Zondacrypto is under pressure after reports of a 99-per cent drop in its Bitcoin reserves.
Users have been complaining that they have not been able to withdraw funds, and sports clubs allege they are not receiving contracted sponsorship fees.
The liquidity scare has triggered a political dispute over who bears responsibility for the lack of regulatory oversight in the sector.
Responding to the news, the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk blamed the opposition Conservatives (PiS)-allied President Karol Nawrocki for having vetoed legislation it had prepared to regulate the crypto market in line with European Union directives in Poland because he had been lobbied by Zondarcrypto.
The firm is the general sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee and is one of the oldest and largest cryptocurrency exchanges in central and eastern Europe. It also sponsored the Polish edition of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Conference in Poland last year.
It was founded in Poland’s Silesia region but relocated its head office to Estonia in 2019 and now operates under that country’s licence.
Polish online news website Wirtualna Polska and its financial site Money.pl cited an analysis on April 6 claiming the platform had lost over 99 per cent liquidity.
An analysis by crypto-market intelligence firm Recoveris, which was commissioned by Wirtualna Polska, claimed Zondacrypto’s Bitcoin assets had fallen from over 55 BTC (Bitcoins) in August 2024 to just 0.18 BTC in March 2026, a decline of 99.7 per cent.
The company’s CEO, Przemysław Kral, has rejected insolvency claims, describing the withdrawal difficulties as “temporary technical issues” connected to the fact that temporarily operations are having to be carried out manually, which slows down payment “but adds to the security of transactions”.
Kral addressed the media reports of April 6 in a post on X yesterday in which he accused money.pl and Wirtualna Polska of “creating panic” on the basis of spurious data and failure to understand the operations of licensed financial institutions.
He insisted the company is “stable, solvent and safe”.
The CEO said the claim of a 99 per cent fall in reserves was based on a “fundamental analytical error” as it took account only of “hot wallets”(digital assets with keys held online for trading) whereas most of the platform’s assets are kept in “cold wallets” (keys held offline for safe storage).
Kral argued that keeping a minimal amount of cryptocurrency in hot wallets is not a “sign of weakness but a conscious liquidity management strategy”.
“On April 1, the balance of our reserve in Bitcoin alone stood at 4,500 BTC,” he wrote, adding that this was more than sufficient to cover all the company’s obligations.
According to critics, though, this still does not prove Zondacrypto’s solvency, with commentators on his post pointing out that the company has yet to present any indisputable proof of reserves and that when asked to do so it refused saying it would not reveal “secrets regarding its operations”.
Interior minister Marcin Kierwiński warned that thousands of investors could wake up without their life savings, blaming Nawrocki and the PiS for blocking crypto market regulation .
Finance minister Andrzej Domański said the President’s veto meant Poland’s financial watchdog KNF did not have the power to cover firms operating under foreign licences.
The leader of the right-wing Confederation party Sławomir Mentzen, though, challenged the government’s narrative, arguing that the vetoed law “would have made no difference”. That was, he said, because Zondacrypto is registered in Estonia and would have been exempt from the new rules until at least June under the government’s proposals that were vetoed by Nawrocki.
Mentzen also accused the government of having failed to introduce the recommended EU regulations over a year ago in favour of extended legislation and that the EU minimum would have been enough to help investors.
Nawrocki has twice vetoed legislation on the cryptocurrency market because it went further in regulating that market than was prescribed in the EU’s directive on markets in crypto assets (MICA) .
The Confederation party and PiS backed the head of state’s stance and called on the government to introduce legislation in line with the EU’s directive rather than attempting greater regulation.
