immediate judgment procedure for Medri and Barbieri

The Gip of the Criminal Court of Milan, Rossana Mongiardo, has ordered the procedure with immediate judgment against Andrea Medri and Davide Barbieri, former administrators of The Rock Trading.

It was reported by the Telegram group The Rock Trading Tutela Legale, which gathers more than 1,800 former clients of the exchange, citing the SITI.

The SITI investigates The Rock Trading

The Italian Union for the Protection of Investment and Savings of Milan (SITI), which is also handling the Swag case, has also created a dedicated website for the The Rock Trading issue.

In the announcement with which they shared the news on Telegram, they write that they are conducting a membership campaign for their collective protection initiative, which now represents just under a thousand former clients of the crypto exchange that collapsed in February 2023.

Among the collective actions still open, in addition to those against The Rock Trading and Swag, there are also those against FTX, Hyperverse/Hyperfund, Ushare/DTSocialize, but also two against Juventus FC Spa and UEFA Football.

Among those ongoing are those against Banca Etruria, MPS, Parmalat, and Cirio, while among those already closed are Seat Pagine Gialle, Mediaset, and Unipol. 

The turning point in the The Rock Trading case

The Rock Trading (TRT) was the main Italian crypto exchange, founded as far back as 2011.

At the beginning of 2023, it started to have liquidity problems, and in February of the same year, it closed its doors.

Subsequently, it was discovered that they no longer had sufficient funds in the cash register to cover all customer deposits. 

The investigations are still ongoing, but the fact that the Gip of the Criminal Court of Milan has ordered the procedure with immediate judgment suggests that they may have reached a final turning point. 

For the crime of bankruptcy of the companies The Rock Trading S.r.l. and Digital Rock -holding S.p.A, the administrators of the exchange, namely the CEO Andrea Medri and the CTO Davide Barbieri, have been charged.

The hearing before the Court of Milan has been scheduled for the upcoming May 15, 2025. 

As of today, however, there is no further public information regarding the case, so it is not known what the turning point in the investigations was that finally allowed the Gip to order the procedure with immediate judgment.

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The Rock Trading case

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For more than a decade, TRT has been the leading Italian crypto exchange, as well as the oldest still in operation. 

Over the years, and particularly during the bear-market of 2022, something went wrong, and although responsibilities have not yet been determined, it ended up losing funds to the point of not even having enough to meet users’ withdrawal requests. 

Not coincidentally, its closure occurred a few months after that of FTX, which happened essentially for the same reasons. However, the underlying causes seem different, because as far as FTX is concerned, the company, despite not having sufficient liquidity to meet all withdrawal requests, had enough resources to cover the value of all deposits, or almost. 

Instead, regarding TRT, it does not seem that the company had sufficient resources to cover the value of the deposits, so it seems very unlikely that the creditors can be reimbursed with a percentage close to 100%. 

The problem of centralized exchanges

When crypto exchanges are centralized, like FTX or TRT, the custody of funds can become an issue. 

In fact, since this is entirely delegated to a private company, it is not only unverifiable by users, but it is also not 100% certain that all users can always have access to all their own funds. 

Furthermore, in case of closure or inaccessibility of the platform, users completely lose control of their funds. 

For this reason, it is strongly discouraged to keep your crypto funds on custodial wallets like those of centralized exchanges for a long time, preferring instead other safer forms. 

The most common alternatives are two. 

The first, simply, is the custody on non-custodial wallets, which are those where the user themselves exclusively possesses the private keys or the seed to generate them.

The second is not to use crypto tokens directly, but funds like ETP (ETF or ETN) whose custody is entrusted to highly reliable entities. This second solution is much simpler, but still riskier compared to the first (at least in theory), since it still involves using custodial wallets, albeit indirectly.