A Rotterdam court has opened bankruptcy proceedings against Knaken, a Dutch crypto trading platform, along with Stichting Knaken Payments, the foundation meant to hold customer funds separately. The ruling landed on Thursday, July 16. By then, roughly 30,000 users had already spent a month and a half locked out of their accounts — the exchange went dark in early June with no explanation at all.
What followed moved quickly. FIOD, the Dutch financial crime investigation service, raided the company's offices, seized computers and other equipment, and opened a criminal case. Prosecutors filed for bankruptcy on June 30, the same month MiCA, the EU's crypto-asset rulebook, finally took full effect across the bloc. It turns out Knaken never registered with the AFM, the Dutch financial regulator, across its entire nine years in business — meaning the platform was never actually authorized to hold client money in the first place.
The part that should worry customers most is the missing money. Investigators put the shortfall at around €7 million, roughly $8 million. The court's own ruling admits it isn't clear where the funds went. A court-appointed trustee will now try to figure out what's left of the company's assets and how to split them among creditors.
For depositors, this is worse than an ordinary bank failure. In the Netherlands, as across most of the EU, deposit guarantee schemes simply don't extend to crypto holdings. If an exchange comes up short on cash, there's no backstop — customers recover whatever fraction, if any, the liquidation turns up.
Knaken's collapse is an awkward footnote to MiCA's rollout. The framework has spent this year forcing household names like Binance and Revolut to sort out licensing across the bloc. But it was also meant to flush out exactly this kind of operator — one that ran for nearly a decade before regulators and investigators caught up, only after the money was already gone.
