Polish deputy prime minister warns of crypto risks as scrutiny grows over country's largest crypto platform
Polish Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski has warned that the lack of state oversight of cryptocurrency exchanges is putting Polish investors’ savings at risk, amid mounting concerns over the financial health of Zondacrypto, the country’s largest crypto platform.“The Polish president vetoed the security of the crypto-asset market, and we have what we have,” Gawkowski, who also serves as digital affairs minister, told reporters in Warsaw. “Zondacrypto, like any other exchange, should be supervised. Without that oversight, we cannot answer the most basic question: are citizens’ assets safe?”The warning comes after media reports suggested that Zondacrypto's visible Bitcoin reserves had fallen by nearly 99.7% over the past 18 months, raising concerns about the exchange's liquidity.According to a report by crypto recovery firm Recoveris, cited by money.pl and Wirtualna Polska, the average amount of Bitcoin held in Zondacrypto’s “hot wallet”—an online wallet used to process customer withdrawals—fell from 55.7 BTC in August 2024 to just 0.18 BTC in March 2026. On April 1, the balance reportedly stood at only 0.086 BTC.Users have also reported delays in withdrawing funds, initially in Bitcoin and more recently in Ethereum, while some sports clubs sponsored by Zondacrypto have complained of missing payments.The controversy has rapidly become political. Gawkowski blamed President Karol Nawrocki for twice vetoing legislation that would have brought the crypto market under the supervision of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF). The bill, rejected for a second time in February, would have allowed the watchdog to monitor crypto exchanges and halt public offerings in suspected cases of abuse.Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Wednesday added to the pressure by disclosing information from the Internal Security Agency (ABW) about financial transfers linked to Zondacrypto Chief Executive Przemyslaw Kral.According to Tusk, Kral donated around 450,000 zlotys (about $124,000) to foundations linked to former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro and a further €70,000 to a foundation associated with Confederation MP Przemyslaw Wipler. Tusk also alleged that Zondacrypto helped sponsor a Conservative Political Action Conference event attended by Nawrocki and former president Andrzej Duda.Gawkowski suggested the links raised serious questions.“For any politician or citizen, this should raise question marks—and in this case not only question marks but exclamation marks,” he said in an interview with TOK FM, adding that the affair “smells of legislative corruption from a mile away.”The National Prosecutor’s Office has now opened a formal investigation into possible irregularities at Zondacrypto following a request by Prosecutor General Waldemar Zurek. The inquiry is tied to a broader probe into the disappearance in 2022 of Sylwester Suszek, founder of BitBay, the exchange that later became Zondacrypto.Zondacrypto and Kral have strongly denied any suggestion of a liquidity crisis. In a statement, the company said it remained “stable, solvent, and secure,” arguing that the media reports looked only at publicly visible “hot wallets” and ignored the much larger “cold wallets” used for offline storage.Kral said the exchange held more than 4,500 BTC on April 1 and that outside analysts could not see the bulk of the company’s assets because they were stored across more than 3.2 million wallet addresses.The company acknowledged that some withdrawals had recently been slower than usual but said this was due to new security procedures requiring manual verification and promised a return to normal processing times within 10 days.
