Exclusive: CoinFLEX CEO On 'Bitcoin Jesus' Roger Ver, Debt And Exchange Withdrawal Freeze - Benzinga

In the second half of Benzinga’s latest “Moon or Bust”crypto livestream hosts Ryan McNamara and Aaron Bry interviewed Mark Lamb, co-founder and CEO of CoinFLEX, a company committed to providing institutions and retail investors an easily accessible platform to earn and trade, and incudes a futures exchange with its own stablecoin that pays interest on-chain every eight hours.

Lamb has been in crypto for nine years and started the first U.K. Bitcoin exchange, CoinFloor.

About four years ago, Lamb started CoinFLEX in Hong Kong. Like many centralized crypto exchanges, CoinFLEX is currently facing a significant problem.

What Happened: Lamb stated, "CoinFLEX gave a non-liquidation account backed by a personal guarantee to one of our customers, and now we need to recoup those funds.”

In normal circumstances, CoinFLEX would automatically liquidate the investor’s position but the trader had a clause in his account that did not allow that to happen.

Lamb confirmed that the owner of this specific account is Roger Ver, a “high-integrity person of significant means, experiencing temporary liquidity issues due to a credit crunch in crypto markets, with significant shareholdings in several unicorn private companies and a large portfolio.”

Due to uncertainty surrounding this counterparty and the overall brutal conditions of the cryptocurrency market, CoinFLEX was forced to pause withdrawals.

The Solution: “CoinFLEX is now looking to tokenize $47 million in debt to resume withdrawals again. We are working on that right now, and we are speaking with larger compilers and we are aiming to get things back up as quickly as possible,” said Lamb.

Via a tweet, Ver claimed a counterparty, assumed to be CoinFLEX, owed him money, but Lamb confirmed that “there is no basis to this” on Benzinga’s livestream.

According to Lamb, “CoinFLEX is currently acting in the interests of its depositors and will continue to focus on that path.”

More specifically, CoinFLEX has a unique solution to this problem. As stated on CoinFLEX’s website, “As a solution toward re-enabling withdrawals, CoinFLEX is planning to monetize this personal guarantee by creating a corresponding liability in the form of a token called Recovery Value USD ('rvUSD'). The terms of the rvUSD token issuance can be found here."

To watch the full interview, check out Benzinga’s YouTube channel below: