Known as Dragon Payments Ltd. since last July, the firm announced Thursday that it had been placed into compulsory liquidation on Jan. 31. Paul Cooper and Paul Appleton of David Rubin Partners were appointed as joint liquidators earlier this week by the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Business.
The company formerly known as London Block Exchange (LBX), which faced a lawsuit from one of its creditors, is to be wound up.
In a statement that has now entirely replaced its website, the company said: «the Joint Liquidators and their team are working toward resolving customers’ concerns, including the recovery of any sums owed, as a matter of priority.»
LBX launched in 2017 after raising more than £2 million (roughly $2.6 million) from investors, according to Business Insider. The company had initially planned to issue prepaid cards allowing users to shop with cryptocurrencies, but it pivoted in 2018 to become a mobile exchange for U.K. investors.
In April 2019, LBX was taken to court by one of its creditors in a bid to recover a debt. Then-CEO Benjamin Dives, who ran the company until the liquidation order, told CoinDesk at the time that £9,900 (approximately $12,900) had not been paid on time. He also denied rumors that the company was facing liquidation.
Podcast host Peter McCormack had claimed the same month that LBX was «insolvent» (in a tweet now deleted) and that employees had not been paid since 2018. The company declined to comment on these claims.
LBX’s filing history at Companies House, the national registrar for businesses in the U.K., has not been updated to include the compulsory liquidation order.
CoinDesk has approached Dives for comment and will update this article if a response is received.
Liquid Crypto Exchange Unveils Digital Wallet Address for Gram Token Sale Proceeds
Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Liquid has revealed the digital wallet address holding the proceeds from the Gram token sale it conducted in July.
In an Aug. 30 announcement, Liquid disclosed the public blockchain wallet address that now keeps all participating customer funds from Gram token sale. Liquid further stated that the funds will remain in cold storage until the release and delivery of the assets by Gram Asia.
Gram is the yet-to-be-released native token for the Telegram Open Network (TON).
According to statistics and analytics platform Etherscan, the wallet has $4,118,853.70 worth of USD Coins (USDC). Additional tokens allocated for the sale, per Liquid’s announcement, have been distributed between other partner exchanges who accepted undisclosed amounts of Gram tokens.
Selling at three times the ICO price
As previously reported, Gram Asia began selling rights to its Gram holdings at $4.00 per token through Liquid on July 10, which is triple the original $1.33 sale price at Gram’s second initial coin offering (ICO) round in March 2018. Back then, Telegram raised $850 million, bringing its total valuation up to $1.7 billion.
The TON blockchain will allow developers to port their Ethereum smart contracts as software startup TON Labs is building a programming language to develop smart contracts on the Ethereum network. TON Labs CEO and managing partner Alexander Filatov said:
“That was probably the most difficult thing we built. It will allow the advanced Ethereum community to pull everything they wrote for Ethereum into TON.”
In late August, Telegram reportedly confirmed that it would issue the first tokens in October.
