If you had a balance sitting at Zondacrypto, exactly one action now applies to you: you have to file your claim with the Estonian bankruptcy trustee yourself. It does not happen automatically, and it does not happen because your account once displayed a number in the app. The cut-off date for the regular filing is 27 October 2026. Anyone who wants to vote at the first creditors’ meeting needs a provisional filing by 11 September 2026.
Whether your balance was held in euros, in Bitcoin or in a smaller token changes nothing about that obligation. Claims are filed in euros, and they are filed in Estonia. This article explains what the court decided, which deadlines are running, in what language you may submit, and why filing still is not a promise of money.
Harju Maakohus, the county court of the Estonian county of Harju in Tallinn, declared BB Trade Estonia OÜ insolvent on 27 August 2026 and opened bankruptcy proceedings. BB Trade Estonia OÜ is the operating company behind the Zondacrypto trading platform. The case runs under file number 2-26-14436. Margus Lentsius, who had already been appointed interim administrator, was named bankruptcy trustee, in Estonian pankrotihaldur.
These details can be checked independently of any press release. The Estonian commercial register e-Äriregister lists the company under registration number 14814864 with the status In bankruptcy, and has recorded Margus Lentsius as bankruptcy trustee with power of disposal over the estate since 28 August 2026. The same register extract states that the company was entered on 30 September 2019, shows share capital of 350,000 euros, was previously called Pinewood Estonia OÜ, and failed to file its 2025 annual accounts by the 30 June 2026 deadline.
With the opening of proceedings, power of disposal over the company’s assets passed from the management to the trustee. Anyone who owes the company money can now discharge that debt only by paying the trustee. Payments to any other party have no effect against the estate. For you as a customer that means one thing above all: from now on there is no customer service deciding about your money, there is a procedure with forms and deadlines.
The European Insolvency Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2015/848, recognises only one main insolvency proceeding per company. It is opened in the member state where the company has the centre of its main interests, abbreviated in the jargon as COMI. For BB Trade Estonia OÜ that is Estonia: the company is registered there, its operations were based there, it held its licence as a virtual currency service provider there, and its terms of use declared Estonian law applicable.
Two things follow, and both work in your favour. A main proceeding opened in Estonia is automatically recognised in every EU member state, without you having to do anything for it. And a claim filed there takes effect throughout the Union. So you do not have to file the same claim additionally with an insolvency court in your own country, and filing at home does not open a parallel proceeding that helps you.
You are a creditor if you had a claim against the company at the time proceedings were opened. That covers the euro balance in your trading account, the crypto assets booked there, withdrawal orders that were never executed, and claims arising from contracts with the company. The claim must have arisen before the opening; it does not have to be due. What you should gather before you fill in anything:
That last point is often underestimated. A filing that states a position in coins rather than in euros does not meet the requirements.
Filing a claim is the formal declaration to the bankruptcy trustee that you hold a quantified claim against the insolvent company, together with the evidence for it. That declaration is your ticket into the proceedings. Without it you do not share in the distribution of the estate, no matter how clear your balance was.
What it is not: an application for payout. Filing puts you in the queue of creditors. Whether anything is distributed in the end, and how much, depends on how much property the trustee can track down and realise. Keeping those two things apart saves you disappointment later, but it does not make filing any less important: whoever is not in the queue is guaranteed to get nothing.
This is the point where the publicly available accounts diverge, and the difference is the most expensive one in the whole procedure for you.
The Estonian firm Magnusson, which filed the bankruptcy petition and represents creditors, writes that the filing must be submitted in Estonian, that the amount must be quantified in euros, and that its form and content must satisfy the requirements of Estonian law and Estonian court practice. An incomplete or defective filing may be rejected or contested.
The Polish firm Skarbiec, by contrast, points to Articles 53 to 55 of Regulation (EU) 2015/848. Under those articles a foreign creditor may file a claim using an EU standard form that carries the heading “Lodgement of claims” in every official language of the Union, and may in principle submit it in any official language of the Union, English included. The court or the trustee may, however, require a translation into the official language of the state of opening. The regulation imposes no obligation to use a lawyer, and known foreign creditors are supposed to be notified individually.
Both accounts can be reconciled: EU law permits submission in your own language, and the Estonian procedure may then request a translation. In practice that means a filing in your own language is not invalid, but it can put you into a supplementary period that you cannot reliably meet shortly before the deadline expires. Anyone filing early can afford that route. Anyone starting in October should supply the Estonian version from the outset.
The regulation provides that known foreign creditors are to be informed individually. You cannot rely on it. Whether the company’s records list you as a known creditor at all depends on the state of its bookkeeping, and the deadline keeps running regardless. The expiry of the deadline is monitored by the creditor, not by the postal service.
Three dates follow from the opening ruling and the statutory two-month period under the Estonian Bankruptcy Act. The period runs from publication in the Estonian official gazette Ametlikud Teadaanded, which took place on the day of the opening.
11 September is the first edge, not the end of the matter. Anyone who lets it pass loses the voting right at the meeting but keeps the option of filing regularly until the end of October. That sequence is the reason to deal with your paperwork now rather than in the autumn.
The three dates come from the publications of two mutually independent law firms, both of which are advertising for mandates from those affected. That is no reason to discard their information, since they agree on the court, the file number, the trustee and the two-month rule, and they match the commercial register. It is, however, a reason to look up the gazette notice yourself before submitting, or to ask the trustee directly, rather than relying on a summary alone. With a deadline that costs you money, the same principle applies as with the insolvency of a crypto exchange generally: check the primary source before you build on a retelling.
Under Estonian bankruptcy law a late filing does not lead to the loss of the claim. It can still be reviewed and recognised; it is only served in the last rank, that is, after all claims filed on time. In proceedings with an ample estate that would be one disadvantage among several. In proceedings where the estate is likely to be thin, the last rank amounts in practice to a zero round.
The review itself is conducted in writing. After the two-month period expires the trustee draws up a provisional list of creditors; each claim is either recognised or contested in it. There is no hearing you would have to travel to.
The decisive question with any insolvent trading platform is whether your crypto assets can be segregated. Segregation means that an asset does not economically belong to the insolvent company but to you, and is therefore released from the estate instead of being distributed among all creditors. As a rule that requires customer holdings to have been kept separate from the company’s own assets and to have been individually attributable.
That is precisely what is missing here in the assessment of the firm Skarbiec. Its analysis states that if customer assets were commingled with the company’s assets, and the nature of the shortfall suggests they were, customers take part in the insolvency proceedings as creditors and not as owners of separately held property. That is a law firm’s assessment and not a judicial finding; the trustee will examine it. For your expectations the difference is large all the same, because it decides whether you get your balance back or a quota on a euro amount.
If you want to follow what this classification depends on in detail, and which custody models favour it, the groundwork is set out with the regulated trading venues, which keep customer holdings separate and have to prove it.
Caution is warranted here, because no reliable official figures on the estate are publicly available so far. What circulates about the shortfall are estimates that lie far apart and are confirmed by no official body. Rely on none of them as long as the insolvency trustee has published nothing. The number of customers affected is put at between roughly 30,000 and 57,000 depending on the source.
These ranges are third-party estimates and not established amounts. What can be taken from the commercial register is sober by comparison: registered tax arrears of 1,512 euros and annual accounts for 2025 that were never filed. How much the trustee actually collects will only become clear once he has tracked down and realised assets. In your own planning, do not count on a particular quota, and certainly not on a particular date.
A bankruptcy trustee’s remit also includes challenging asset transfers from the period before the opening and pursuing claims against the management. Such proceedings take years, and their proceeds flow into the estate. For you that means: filing is a decision for today, distribution a question for the day after tomorrow. The one does not depend on the other.
Around every well-known insolvency a market of offers springs up promising a swift recovery of the money. A few features separate the serious ones from the rest fairly reliably:
Under the European Insolvency Regulation you can submit the filing itself without a lawyer. Whether you nevertheless get help is a cost-benefit question that depends above all on the size of your claim and on your willingness to engage with Estonian form requirements. There is no obligation, and nobody may tell you otherwise.
Zondacrypto started out in Poland in 2014 as BitBay and was for a time one of the largest trading platforms in Central and Eastern Europe. After warnings from the Polish financial supervisor KNF in 2018, the group moved its place of business to Estonia and later operated under the new name. In April 2026 the site was offline and customer assets stayed where they were; in June 2026 the Estonian financial supervision unit withdrew BB Trade Estonia OÜ’s licence. Two months later came the bankruptcy ruling.
There is something to learn from that sequence for your own practice, without having to name a culprit. A balance on a trading platform is a claim against a company and not ownership of a coin. That claim is worth exactly as much as the company’s solvency and the quality of its custody. A change of jurisdiction after a supervisory warning is a signal you are entitled to take seriously, and the question of who holds customer assets where and separated from what belongs before your first deposit, not in a bankruptcy case.
You can look up the status of the company, the name of the trustee and the date of his appointment yourself at any time in the Estonian commercial register. That is the source no summary replaces.
(As of September 6, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
