--- title: "What is known about the 4,503 BTC cold wallet?" language: en canonical: https://dossiertwist.com/dossiers/bb-trade-estonia-ou/cold-wallet/ as_of: 2026-10-19 keywords: ["BB Trade Estonia OÜ","Pinewood Estonia OÜ","zondacrypto","Zonda Global","BitBay","Divisio Holding AG","Przemysław Kral","Sylwester Suszek","BB Trade Switzerland AG","Orion Software","AdmiTrade OÜ","virtual currency licence FVT000209","Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit","Harju County Court bankruptcy","Prokuratura Krajowa","TryPay","AMINA Bank","client funds","crypto-asset custody","MiCA"] --- # What is known about the 4,503 BTC cold wallet? **Question.** What do the retained records show about the cold wallet said to hold about 4,500 bitcoin, and about the exchange's custody and wallet flows? **Answer.** In April 2026 BB Trade Estonia OÜ named a bitcoin address holding 4,503 BTC as its cold wallet and said the keys had been held by Sylwester Suszek, who has been missing since March 2022; prosecutors recorded the owner's statement that the exchange had had no access to such a wallet since 2022. Claimants' counsel describes the address as a wallet dormant since 2016 and reads a custody export and blockchain data as showing the ether cold vault emptied, while press citing a forensics firm reported the hot wallets all but drained; none of these accounts is verified in the retained record. ## The reserve the exchange declared - Analysis: A law firm acting for claimants describes an 80-page statement of BB Trade Estonia OÜ dated 18 June 2021 and signed by Sylwester Suszek as chairman of the management board, certifying the exchange's wallets at 31 December 2020: 4,513.93 BTC in the cold wallet, 308.48 BTC in the hot wallet and 51,646.73 ETH in the cold ether wallet, with the bitcoin figures taken from the exchange's internal "Funds Monitor" system. The statement itself was not retained, and the firm notes that it gives no bitcoin address, so it cannot be matched to the address cited in 2026. [src-083] - Analysis: The auditor of the 2021 statements disclaimed an opinion in November 2022 largely for this reason: bitcoin worth about EUR 145.7 million was, according to the company, held in a wallet to which management had restricted access citing security measures, so its existence and ownership could not be verified. [src-003] ## April 2026: the keys and the prosecutors - Analysis: When the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Katowice opened its investigation on 17 April 2026, its release stated that the exchange's owner had indicated that since 2022 the exchange had had no access to a so-called cold wallet said to hold about 4,500 BTC, and that this had been concealed from clients. That is the prosecutors' summary of the owner's statement, not a finding, and the release does not say how or when access was lost. In early April 2026 Przemysław Kral had said that Zondacrypto was stable, solvent and safe and called a press analysis of a 99% fall in its bitcoin reserves erroneous, untrue and harmful; on 16 April 2026 he said publicly that the keys to the roughly 4,500-bitcoin wallet were held by Sylwester Suszek, the founder of the predecessor exchange BitBay, who has been missing since March 2022. [src-065] [src-112] - Analysis: The company's statement of 16 April 2026, attributed to Kral, identified a specific address holding 4,503 BTC as its cold wallet. A law firm acting for claimants says the address is a publicly known wallet dormant since March 2016 with no outgoing transactions, and that the company never gave auditors or the public a signed message or test transaction proving control. Both the company's account and the firm's reading of the blockchain are unverified in the retained record, and the address is not published here. In the bankruptcy, according to the same firm citing the trustee's report, the trustee could confirm only about EUR 167,000 of cash on accounts abroad, and the chief executive maintains that there is no key to the address, which accounted for 77% of the assets in the 2024 statements. [src-008] [src-083] [src-075] ## Custody records and wallet flows - Analysis: The claimants' law firm has read a Fireblocks export dated 31 December 2024, filed in the bankruptcy proceedings before Harju County Court but not retained in this case. By its account the export lists 685,738 wallets in 227,496 vaults, including a cold vault with 4,796 ETH but only 0.000012 BTC; bitcoin deposits were handled by a second custodian, BitGo, which held 59.9 BTC on 1 January 2025, while the 4,503 BTC that balanced the accounts sat on a 2016 address outside any vault. The firm counts 14,846 client vaults created from 25 March to the end of 2021, 34,901 in 2022, 78,273 in 2023 and 99,463 in 2024, so that 20,230 predate the end of March 2022 and 207,253 came afterwards, and links that timing to its view that the exchange's own reconciliations showed only partial coverage of client liabilities after March 2022; the reconciliations were not retained either. [src-083] - Analysis: Reading public blockchain data against the same export, the firm says the exchange's ether cold vault, hot wallet and network-fee wallet match addresses that a public block explorer labels "Zonda"; by 15 September 2026 the cold-vault address held 0.4999 ETH and illiquid tokens worth about USD 236,000, with nothing left of the 4,796 ETH and 1.5 million USDC held at the balance-sheet date. It adds that tokens left the cold-vault address throughout the first quarter of 2026, the last on 13 April 2026, three days before the cold-wallet statement, and that on 19 April 2026, after client payouts had stopped, about 1.39 ETH left the hot wallet, partly to a deposit address at the Binance exchange. These readings are not verified in the retained record, and addresses and transaction identifiers are not published here. [src-083] - Analysis: Swiss crypto-industry press reported in May 2026, citing a Zug blockchain-forensics firm, that bitcoin in the exchange's hot wallets fell from 55.7 BTC in August 2024 to 0.07 BTC on 1 April 2026, and that between December 2025 and April 2026 there were 511 transactions to wallets at the Kraken exchange totalling about USD 21 million, including USD 4.59 million in bitcoin; the article names BB Trade Estonia OÜ as the operating company, and the analysis itself was not retained. The claimants' law firm, citing criminal complaints and press coverage, says that shortly before the withdrawal crisis the company moved crypto-assets worth more than PLN 76 million to Kraken, operated by Payward Ltd.; no transfer records are in the retained record. According to the firm, the company told customers the transfers were for market making, and on 14 April 2026 Kral wrote that investing customer funds was not to be confused with liquidity management. [src-096] [src-008] ## What the trustee found - Analysis: The claimants' law firm, citing the trustee's findings, says that on the day of the freeze the operator's balance sheet showed EUR 476 million of assets, EUR 347 million in cryptocurrency and EUR 129 million in loans and shareholdings, of which the trustee could confirm only EUR 167,000 in cash on accounts abroad; the rest were book entries without source documents, prepared from aggregate data that management passed to the bookkeeper. Customer liabilities of EUR 429 million sat on several aggregate accounts without a breakdown by customer, and 77% of the assets in the 2024 statements was the single address holding 4,503 coins, to which according to Kral there is no key, although in a notarised statement in June 2025 he had said access existed. The company had thirteen employees and its bookkeeping ended on 22 April 2026. The trustee's report and the June 2025 statement are not in the retained record. [src-075] [src-108] ## Sources - [src-083] Other source · src-083 - [src-003] Annual report of BB Trade Estonia OÜ for 2021, filed with the Estonian Commercial Register, Centre of Registers and Information Systems (RIK), Estonian e-Business Register, 2022-11-30 - [src-065] Śledztwo w sprawie Zondacrypto (investigation concerning Zondacrypto), Prokuratura Regionalna w Katowicach (Regional Prosecutor's Office in Katowice), 2026-04-17 - [src-112] Media source · src-112 - [src-008] Other source · src-008 - [src-075] Other source · src-075 - [src-096] Media source · src-096 - [src-108] Media source · src-108