Today the waiting took place Digital Rock Holding shareholders’ meetingthe holding company headed by The Rock Tradingthe Italian cryptocurrency exchange whose activities have now been suspended for a month and whose fate are still shrouded in mystery.
In this context, the objective of today’s meeting is precisely to “appoint the new administrative body”, as well as taking stock of the events concerning the broker, and there are those who hypothesize that the company is heading towards bankruptcy…
But what happened to the crypto broker?
The Rock Trading is a cryptocurrency broker born in 2011 in Milan, one of the first cryptocurrency exchanges in Italy and currently boasts about 34 thousand users sign in.
The problems for The Rock Trading started on February 17th when the platform reported, through a press release, that it had a lack of liquidity, which is why it failed to meet all withdrawal requests.
Here is the official press release dated February 17:
The Rock Trading announces that it was necessary to interrupt the operation of its platform starting from today’s date, due to difficulties encountered in managing liquidity. The company is conducting internal audits to identify the causes of the problem and evaluating the adoption of all appropriate or necessary initiatives to protect customers and other stakeholders. Further update communications on the measures taken will be provided shortly.
Since then, users of the cryptocurrency platform have not been able to withdraw or deposit cryptocurrencies or check their balance.
After these events, the resignation of the president of The Rock Trading, Stefania Barsalini, followed, and after a few days the Italian Union for the Protection of Investments and Savings (SITI), declared its intention start a class action to protect users registered on the platform and who owned cryptocurrencies on the exchange, but also those who had participated in the crowdfunding launched in 2020 by the company in charge of the exchange, Digital Rock Holding.
Given the media coverage of the case, both the Florence and Milan prosecutors have opened an investigation into the incident, starting to investigate the top management of the company and their work.
Currently the investigations would still be ongoing and the crime hypotheses that have currently been formulated are: computer fraud, fraud, but also embezzlement and false accounting.
So many mysteries about the broker
At the moment, the reasons that led to the blocking of the broker The Rock Trading are not yet clear. But not only that, it is not even clear how the broker, in the 2021 balance sheet, recorded a loss of €900 thousand in ether following a hacker attack.
Added to all this is the question raised by Il Sole 24 Ore degli hardware wallet, or the keys in which the broker kept his reserves. In this sense, these flash drives were reportedly found empty, but it is not known exactly how much they contained.
Possible solutions?
In recent weeks, a document has been circulating among the members of the company, which hypothesized possible solutions to revive the cryptocurrency platform. The idea would be to create a new debt token that has been created, to then list this token separately and hope that it will allow the broker and its customers to regain possession of their cryptocurrencies. However, even this proposal seems unlikely because in order to work at its best, there must be customer trust in the platform, an element that is lacking every day.
However, liquidity problems are not always easy to resolve and for this reason it is likely that it will still take some time.
At the moment, we still don’t know exactly everything that emerged from the Digital Rock Holding shareholders’ meeting and whether this will be positive or negative for the broker, but something has already leaked out.
The outcome of the meeting
According to the first rumors, the company would have a hole of at least 15-20 million euros, caused by the disappearance of cryptocurrencies for still unknown causes.
Another interesting detail that would have emerged concerns the number of customers of the platform, which according to rumors would not have been 34,000 but 12,200, about a third of what was declared.
Finally, no candidate would have presented itself at the meeting to assume the role of administrator of Digital Rock Trading, which is why the founder Andrea Medri would have proposed a new meeting in about a month.
