CoinFLEX Founder Offers Bitcoin Evangelist Roger Ver ‘Olive Branch’ to Settle Alleged $84M Debt

Co-founder of the troubled crypto exchange CoinFLEX Mark Lamb issued an open letter to Bitcoin evangelist and Bitcoin Cash promoter Roger Ver offering him an “olive branch” of “two years of free trading on OPNX,” a newly-launched claims exchange co-founded by Lamb. 

The “olive branch” refers to ending a longstanding feud between the two, which would see Ver pay back an alleged outstanding loan to CoinFLEX. 

In June last year, Lamb accused Ver of defaulting on a $47 million loan. At the time, Ver dismissed the claim as “blatantly false.” Since then, Lamb’s claim on Ver has nearly doubled, according to a lawsuit filed by CoinFLEX against Ver back in July last year. 

​​”The first estimate of $47 million which we communicated did not include the significant loss in liquidating his significant FLEX Coin positions,” read a CoinFLEX announcement at the time.  “Now that we have found a bid for that size, the liquidations have created a final deficit of $84 million for the account.”

The latest open letter also asks Ver to “agree on a payment plan for the $84 million USD.” 

Alongside Ver, he included Peter Smith, CEO and founder of crypto exchange Blockchain.com, in his tweet.

The letter asks Smith to “pay the 3 million FLEX Coin owed to us via your offshore Blockchain.com Cayman entity,” likely a reference to another alleged debt that hit the press earlier this year, which, in language echoing Ver, the exchange dismissed as “completely meritless and a work of fiction.”

FLEX Coin (FLEX) is the native token of CoinFLEX’s crypto exchange. 

Upon satisfying these conditions, Lamb promised Ver and Smith an “equity stake” in OPNX. 

Ver, Lamb, and Smith did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

The letter outlined the tokenization of debt meant to save CoinFLEX’s creditors and the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community from “long drawn-out legal processes” by offering a liability token called “Recovery Value USD” (rvUSD) on OPNX. 

The idea of rvUSD was first floated back in June last year when details of the alleged multi-million dollar debt first surfaced. 

The CoinFLEX community unanimously approved of the plan the following September, as did a Seychelles court in March this year, after CoinFLEX halted withdrawals and filed for restructuring citing “extreme market conditions” and “continued uncertainty involving a counterparty,” a thinly veiled reference to Ver’s debt.  

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What is OPNX?

The Open Exchange (OPNX) is a bankruptcy claims exchange that was announced by co-founder Su Zhu last February. It caters to those looking to trade bankruptcy claims—in cases from FTX to Blockfi—and uses CoinFLEX’s FLEX Coin as its native token. 

The project is the brainchild of a collaboration between Three Arrows Capital (3AC) founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, and CoinFLEX founders Mark Lamb and Sudhu Arumugam. 

A leaked early pitch deck drew negative responses from CoinFLEX’s community after they found out CoinFLEX’s founders had teamed up with the 3AC founders to raise $25 million. 

Three Arrows Capital was one of the larger and more well-known casualties of last year’s liquidity crisis that rocked the industry in the wake of Terra’s spectacular collapse last May. 

OPNX officially launched yesterday, with the first tradable claims token being rvUSD.