SINGAPORE - A cryptocurrency exchange set up by the co-founders of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital will say goodbye to its users on Valentine’s Day.

OPNX, created by Three Arrows’ Mr Zhu Su and Kyle Davies for the trading of bankruptcy claims, will shut down after a little over a year in operation.

Users of the exchange were notified in an e-mail that they have to settle their accounts and make the necessary withdrawals before Feb 14.

The two men had set up OPNX with co-founders Mark Lamb and his wife Leslie, as they tried to stage a comeback six months after Three Arrows collapsed and two months after the infamous fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX.

The Lambs are behind CoinFlex, a digital asset exchange that filed for restructuring in the Seychelles in August 2022.

OPNX was started to let creditors of insolvent exchanges such as FTX tokenise their claims and allow claims as collateral.

Mr Zhu and Davies, who went to the same school and university and worked as traders at Credit Suisse, founded Three Arrows in 2012.

It was the first big crypto firm to go bankrupt in 2022, wiping out billions of investors’ funds, amid the fallout from the collapse of cryptocurrencies Luna and TerraUSD in May that year.

Mr Zhu was arrested at Changi Airport in September 2023 while trying to leave the country.

He and Davies, whose whereabouts is unknown, were both sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for failing to cooperate with investigations into Three Arrows’ failure.

The duo were also handed a nine-year ban by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, barring them from taking part in the management, acting as a director or becoming a substantial shareholder of any regulated capital market services company here.

Mr Zhu, who was released from prison in December 2023 after serving his sentence, in a recent podcast described his time in Singapore prison as “really enjoyable”.