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Przemysław Kral, the second consecutive chief executive of Polish crypto exchange Zondacrypto, has disappeared, Polish authorities said, months after founder Sylwester Suszek vanished in March 2022 and as customers remain locked out of an estimated $336 million in Bitcoin.
The exchange began operations in Poland in 2014 under the BitBay name, founded by Sylwester Suszek. Suszek disappeared in March 2022 after travelling to meet an associate near Katowice.
His family has said it believes he was kidnapped and killed. Polish prosecutors subsequently brought criminal allegations against the associate, Marian Wszolek, who later also disappeared.
Przemyslaw Kral, who later became associated with the exchange, was the last known senior figure to communicate publicly with customers.
According to the report, his final social-media communication came on April 16, 2026, when he urged customers to remain calm. His subsequent whereabouts remain unclear.
The uncertainty has fueled anger among customers seeking access to their assets. Robert Nogacki, a Warsaw lawyer representing affected clients, offered a blunt assessment of the situation.
For investors, however, allegations remain allegations. The central questions are whether customer assets remain recoverable, how the exchange’s reserves were managed and what investigators can establish about the company’s operations.
The Zondacrypto collapse has also drawn attention to the exchange’s reported Bitcoin hodings.
Before the shutdown, Kral reportedly told customers that Zondacrypto held approximately 4,500 BTC, then worth about $336 million, and suggested that the relevant wallet could only be accessed through keys controlled by the missing founder.
Blockchain-forensics firm Recoveris reported that the exchange’s principal Bitcoin hot wallet had declined by approximately 99.7% from its recorded monthly-average peak of 55.7 BTC in August 2024 to 0.18 BTC in March 2026. By April 1, the wallet reportedly contained only 0.086 BTC, valued at roughly $9,700 at the time.
Recoveris also identified 511 transactions from Zondacrypto-related wallets to a Kraken deposit address between mid-December 2025 and early April 2026, with a combined value estimated at about $21 million.
Importantly, the visible hot-wallet balance does not by itself establish how much cryptocurrency the company held in cold storage or other wallets.
A blockchain investigation into identifiable wallets can reveal movements of funds, but it cannot automatically prove that an exchange’s entire reserve has disappeared.
The unresolved gap between reported reserves and independently observable balances is therefore one of the most important questions surrounding the Zondacrypto collapse.
The exchange reportedly declined to provide wallet addresses as evidence of its claimed cold reserves, citing European regulatory frameworks including MiCA and DORA. The report said those rules did not themselves prohibit such disclosure.
Estonia’s Financial Intelligence Unit cancelled the licence of BB Trade Estonia OÜ, the company’s parent entity, on June 29, 2026.
The regulator had previously imposed restrictions on the company in May, including measures that prevented it from taking on new customers.
The timing was significant because the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, or MiCA, established a transitional period for crypto-asset service providers that had been operating legally under national frameworks.
ESMA’s official text states that qualifying providers could continue operating until July 1, 2026, or until authorization was granted or refused, whichever came first.
The Estonian licence was therefore revoked only days before the end of the EU transitional deadline. The regulatory action did not, by itself, determine what happened to customers’ assets, but it added significant pressure to an exchange already facing withdrawal problems and criminal scrutiny.
The Estonian regulator’s role also has limits. As reported in the original account, its mandate focuses on compliance with anti-money-laundering requirements rather than independently guaranteeing that customer deposits exist or are safely held.
According to a statement cited in the report, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice’s investigation into Zondacrypto was incorporated into a wider case handled by the National Prosecutor’s Office’s organized-crime and corruption department in Silesia.
Authorities are examining the creation and operation of BitBay and Zondacrypto alongside matters connected to Suszek’s disappearance.
Those allegations should not be treated as established facts unless confirmed through judicial findings or other authoritative evidence. What is established is that Polish authorities are investigating the company’s activities, while customers continue to face uncertainty over their funds.
For crypto investors, the Zondacrypto collapse offers a familiar but important lesson: an exchange’s reputation, regulatory status and stated reserves are not substitutes for independently verifiable control of assets.
The case also highlights the importance of understanding whether a platform operates under a current licence, how customer assets are segregated and whether reserve claims can be independently verified on-chain.
Until investigators establish what happened to the company’s assets and the relevant authorities clarify the legal status of affected customer funds, the Zondacrypto collapse remains an unresolved case involving financial losses, regulatory intervention and missing executives.
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