German Authorities Seize $38M in Crypto from eXch—Another ’Trustless’ Platform Proves Anything But

German police just turned eXch into an involuntary HODLer—confiscating $38 million in crypto from the platform. No exit scams, no rug pulls—just good old-fashioned law enforcement intervention.

Subheader: When ’Decentralization’ Meets the Long Arm of the Law

The raid underscores a brutal truth for crypto true believers: even in the permissionless wild west of DeFi, regulators still hold the master private key. The seizure—one of Germany’s largest—targeted eXch’s alleged role in laundering proceeds from darknet markets.

Closing Thought: Another day, another crypto platform learning that ’not your keys, not your coins’ works both ways—especially when Interpol comes knocking. Maybe next time they’ll spend some of those transaction fees on compliance lawyers instead of vaporware marketing.

It involved several cryptocurrency assets, including Bitcoin, marking the third-largest crypto confiscation in the BKA’s history. Along with shutting down the platform, the announcement stated that authorities also confiscated eXch’s German server infrastructure, which contained over eight terabytes of data.

According to the statement, the BKA defined eXch as a “swapping” service that facilitated the exchange of different cryptocurrency assets without the need for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) procedures.

The platform reportedly enabled $1.09 billion in cryptocurrency transfers, some of which were thought to have a “criminal origin,” including money laundered during the Bybit hack.

Crypto expert ZachXBT claimed in a post that eXch was also responsible for laundering millions of dollars from other cryptocurrency thefts and exploits, such as Multisig, FixedFloat, and the $243 million Genesis creditor theft. According to ZachXBT, those incidents were in addition to “countless phishing drain services over the past few years with refusal to block addresses and freeze orders.”

eXch, which previously denied any role in laundering Bybit hack funds, announced its closure by May 1 in a post on Bitcoin Talk

The organization decided there was no point in carrying on with such operations in a hostile environment where SIGINT targets them because of misinterpreted objectives, even after unsuccessful attempts to dismantle their infrastructure