Roger Ver Goes Dark After Defaulting on CoinFLEX Loan

Prominent Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Roger Ver went dark on Tuesday after CoinFLEX CEO Mark Lamb shut down Ver’s brief effort to deny that he was behind the company’s financial woes.

“Recently some rumors have been spreading that I have defaulted on a debt to a counter-party,” Ver wrote on Twitter early Tuesday afternoon. “These rumors are false. Not only do I not have a debt to this counter-party, but this counter- party owes me a substantial sum of money, and I am currently seeking the return of my funds.”

He didn’t name CoinFLEX, but Lamb promptly shot back, writing on Twitter, “Roger Ver owes CoinFLEX $47 Million USDC. We have a written contract with him obligating him to personally guarantee any negative equity on his CoinFLEX account and top up margin regularly. He has been in default of this agreement and we have served a notice of default. He had a long track record of previously topping up margin and meeting margin requirements in accordance with this agreement. We have been speaking to him on calls frequently about this situation with the aim of resolving it. We still would like to resolve it.

“He is denying that the debt pertains to him and so we felt the need to clarify to the public that yes – the debt is 100% related to his account,” Lamb added. “Roger Ver [is] a citizen of the European Union who we believe has significant assets in the US, UK and other relevant jurisdictions. CoinFLEX also categorically denies that we have any debts [owed] to him. His statement is blatantly false. It is unfortunate that Roger Ver needs to resort to such tactics in order to deflect from his liabilities and responsibilities.”

Ver had not offered a response as of 5 p.m. Eastern time, nearly five hours after Lamb’s tweets. The spat began after a Twitter user named “FatManTerra” claimed in a morning tweet that a “verified insider” confirmed Ver had defaulted on a $47 million loan he accepted from CoinFLEX to make leveraged bets that Bitcoin Cash’s price would rise. CoinFLEX halted user withdrawals on June 23, attributing it to a lack of funds that resulted from a “long-time customer of CoinFLEX” who went “into negative equity.”

The platform is attempting to sell a newly minted token, rvUSD, in order to compensate for the losses. The company said the letters are an acronym for “Recovery Value,” not Ver’s name.

“We want to reiterate that this individual is a high-integrity person of significant means,” Lamb said in a Tuesday blog post on the company’s website, adding that he was “experiencing temporary liquidity issues due to a credit (and price) crunch in crypto markets (and non-crypto markets), with substantial shareholdings in several unicorn private companies and a large portfolio.”

Ver, 43, gained notoriety over the last several years for his fervent advocacy of Bitcoin Cash, a bitcoin fork created in 2017. The token’s price peaked in 2017 at nearly $3,800 before falling to less than $80 in 2018. As of Tuesday, it stood at $106.