Once a top Bitcoin pool, Poolin files Chapter 11 with $100M in debts
What's the deal? Poolin Technology Pte. Ltd., the Singapore-based company that once ran one of Bitcoin's largest mining pools, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 22, 2026, in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey. The filing covers Poolin and two US affiliates, Lonestar DreamDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → Inc. and Lonestar Taproot LLC. Court documents list prepetition obligations of more than $100 million against less than $10 million in assets.
What's Poolin? A mining pool lets individual Bitcoin miners combine their hashrate—the computing power machines burn to add new blocks to the blockchain—so the group wins rewards more often than any single miner could. Founded in Beijing in 2017 by Bitmain veterans Zhibiao "Kevin" Pan, Fa Zhu, and Tianzhao Li, Poolin at its peak controlled nearly a fifth of the network's global hashrate. It later expanded into crypto lending and interest-bearing accounts via Poolin Wallet.
What went wrong? Trouble began in September 2022, when Poolin froze withdrawals for Poolin Wallet and Pool Account users, citing "some liquidity issues" during that year's crypto crash. Rather than repaying customers, it issued IOU tokens as placeholders for real Bitcoin—debts that never got repaid.
Those unpaid IOUs are now the largest liability in the case. About 11,700 wallet holders are owed $163.7 million, according to a court declaration from chief restructuring officer Michael DuFrayne.
By the numbers: Poolin's Texas mining and hosting operations, run through Lonestar Dream, shut down entirely on July 10, 2026, and the company does not intend to resume. The Texas units had already piled up roughly $45.9 million in losses since opening, plus another $8.8 million from selling equipment at discounted prices between fiscal 2023 and 2025.
What's the endgame? To repay what it can, Poolin is auctioning its two West Texas sites, with Thor CALAP LLC offering a $52 million stalking-horse bid—an opening offer that sets the floor other bidders must beat in a court-supervised sale. That covers only the physical mining infrastructure, not the frozen wallet balances, and falls well short of what users are owed.
The signal: Recovery for the 11,700 IOU holders now hinges largely on the Texas auction, more than three years after their withdrawals were first frozen. Poolin's collapse is a delayed casualty of the 2022 crypto crash, showing how liquidity freezes and IOU workarounds can leave creditors waiting years for cents on the dollar.
Read more: Decrypt · Yahoo Finance
