Money from Nothing: An Olympic Arrest and the Mechanics of zondacrypto’s ZND Token
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec · Robert Nogacki, attorney-at-law (radca prawny) · August 29, 2026
A court in Katowice has ordered three months of pre-trial detention for Radosław P., the president of the Polish Olympic Committee. (Polish outlets, following the country’s press-law convention for criminal suspects, give only the initial.) His is the first publicly known detention of a person from outside the exchange itself in the investigation of zondacrypto, until recently one of Poland’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which stopped paying out customer withdrawals this spring and which a court in Estonia, its registered seat, declared bankrupt on August 27th. Prosecutors assess customer losses, at this stage, at no less than three hundred and fifty million złoty. Alongside a charge of paid influence peddling, with a watch worth nearly a hundred and seventy thousand złoty in the background, prosecutors filed a rarer and, we will argue, weightier charge: that he induced the exchange to pay chosen creditors at the expense of the rest. The essence of that charge fits in a single sentence: on this exchange, getting your money out was not a customer’s right, it was a favor.
At the center of the story, from the beginning, stands the ZND token, the exchange’s private currency: seven hundred million units conjured by two lines of code. In April, we described how the can was made: issuance costs of a few dozen dollars, a white paper for a label. In July, we showed, from blockchain data, how the warehouse emptied: ninety-nine million tokens moved in eleven days to addresses attributed to the outside exchange KuCoin, while customers at home were shown a price as much as five times higher than anywhere else. Now that prosecutors have reached for a statute few people remember exists, it is worth assembling the machine whole: the printing press; the earning program, in which interest was paid in the house’s own print; and the financial statements, where the machine left its fingerprints. Because this case was never about the technology. It is about the oldest financial instrument there is: other people’s trust.
The Night That Ended in Three Months
On Friday evening, Radosław P. was brought to the district court of Katowice-Wschód, in southern Poland. The detention hearing began around midnight and ran until five in the morning; the suspect was led out through a back door, and no decision was announced. Only toward seven did Anna Adamiak, the spokeswoman for Poland’s Prosecutor General, confirm that the court had ordered three months of pre-trial detention.
The arrest itself had come on Thursday, in Warsaw, carried out by officers of the Central Bureau for Combatting Cybercrime on the instructions of the Silesian branch of the National Prosecutor’s Office, the same unit that now runs the zondacrypto investigation. There are two charges. The first is paid influence peddling under Article 230 § 1 of the Polish Criminal Code of June 6, 1997 (the Kodeks karny): according to prosecutors, the suspect invoked, in 2025, connections at UOKiK, Poland’s antitrust and consumer-protection authority, said to flow from his acquaintance with a former Prime Minister, and, in exchange for a watch worth nearly a hundred and seventy thousand złoty, undertook to fix a pending UOKiK matter for the exchange’s chief executive. The outlets that broke the story describe the watch as a Patek Philippe worth some forty thousand euros. The second charge, the one this piece is about, concerns satisfying some creditors at the expense of the rest in the face of looming insolvency.
The suspect denies both charges and has given extensive testimony. Outside the courthouse he told reporters that he had lost two hundred thousand euros on the exchange and had paid for the watch himself. “What,” he asked, “am I supposed to confess to?” He maintains that the prosecutors’ claim that he recovered his funds is untrue. This is a dispute over facts that a court will resolve, and until it does the presumption of innocence holds; a charge, even one backed by detention, remains the position of one side of a proceeding.
The More Interesting Charge
Public attention will fasten on the watch, because a watch photographs well. From the vantage of several thousand victims, though, the second charge matters more. Article 302 § 1 of the code punishes a debtor who, threatened with insolvency or bankruptcy and unable to satisfy all of his creditors, pays or secures only some of them, and in doing so acts to the detriment of the rest; the penalty runs to two years. According to the prosecutors’ communiqués, the alleged conduct consisted of inducing a board member of BB Trade Estonia OÜ, the Estonian company that operates the exchange, to release a hundred and ninety-five thousand złoty and a hundred thousand euros from the platform. This is said to have happened in April of 2026, by which point zondacrypto’s trouble paying out was public knowledge and tens of thousands of customers were waiting at closed doors. The word “inducing,” meanwhile, points to incitement under Article 18 § 2 of the code, to an act whose principal offender must be someone managing the debtor’s affairs (Article 308 of the code); Rzeczpospolita reports that the allegation was framed in conjunction with Article 21 § 2, and the full qualification will be known only from the charging decision itself.
Why does this charge matter more than the watch? For three reasons. First, it translates the victims’ experience into legal language and gives judicial form to the sentence this piece opened with. Second, by filing it, prosecutors formally take the position that in April of 2026 the company faced looming insolvency. That thesis carries weight far beyond one man’s case, because the exchange was taking fresh deposits at the very same time, lured in part by a price premium on the ZND token that could not be cashed out. Third, the charge assumes that who got paid was decided by a person, not a queue; Rzeczpospolita, a leading Polish daily, reports a dispute over whether the suspect’s refund was in fact completed, which likewise awaits resolution in court. Prosecutors assess client losses at no less than three hundred and fifty million złoty, several thousand criminal complaints have been filed, and by an order of July 30th, made public in early August, the investigation was merged with the inquiry into the disappearance of Sylwester Suszek, the founder of BitBay, zondacrypto’s predecessor, whose person had earlier served as the narrative about the lost keys.
It is worth, at this point, opening the commentaries, because Article 302 § 1 is a statute with a narrow gate, and the fight will be over the gate. The construction that reaches a person outside the company is one the scholarship knows and accepts: a creditor who is being paid off and who collaborates in the act of his own preferment answers alongside the debtor as a so-called extraneus, under Article 21 § 2 of the code, on the condition that he knew the debtor’s situation; that is how Robert Zawłocki puts it in his commentary on the provision. The knowledge condition will be contested ground, though it is hard to argue convincingly that one did not know the doors were shut while lobbying to have a side door opened. Next: the statute requires an in-between state. It covers neither a debtor who can pay everyone nor one who has no assets left at all; what is punishable is favoritism by a debtor still partly solvent while total insolvency looms, a point on which Jarosław Majewski and Zawłocki agree. The case law adds that there is a qualitative difference between the state of threatened insolvency and the state that obliges a bankruptcy filing, and that the first precedes the second (a ruling of the Wrocław Court of Appeal of November 5, 2008, case II AKa 203/08). Finally, there is the matter of the plural: the statute speaks of paying “some” creditors, and part of the doctrine demands at least two who were satisfied, so the precise contours of the principal act, which the communiqués do not disclose, will matter.
Out of that in-between state comes a defense that sounds, at first, like a paradox: argue that in April of 2026 the company was not merely threatened with insolvency but insolvent outright, because then the creditor-favoritism statute does not apply at all. The paradox is smaller than it looks. The insolvency that switches the statute off means, in the doctrine’s reading, an absence of assets, not an absence of liquidity; the debtor who has assets but cannot turn them into cash is the very example Majewski gives of a case the statute covers. And the 2024 filings show, on the asset side, more than a hundred million euros in loans and advances extended to related parties; a receivable is an asset, however hard to collect, and some of those loans were in fact repaid after the balance-sheet date. Above all, though, this dispute pays the victims either way, because the defense must pick one of two claims: that the money was there but was not being paid out, or that the money was gone while deposits were still being taken. The first confirms that withdrawals were discretionary; the second, that deposits were taken in insolvency. Either serves the victims evidentially; the two differ only in the statute they end in. Two flanking provisions round out the picture: Article 307 of the code, under which an offender who voluntarily makes the harm whole can earn an extraordinary reduction of the sentence, even a waiver of it, which hands the suspects a published price list for returning the money, and Article 18 § 2 of the Commercial Companies Code, under which a final conviction for an offense against economic dealings closes the door, as a rule for five years, to management boards, supervisory boards, commercial proxies, and liquidatorships.
To understand why, on this exchange, leaving became a privilege, one has to go back to the instrument that financed the asymmetry. The token.
The Printing Press
A reminder of the mechanics, laid out in detail in April. ZND is an ERC-20 contract on the Ethereum blockchain. Its issuance comes down to two lines of code: the first assigns a name, the second creates seven hundred million units and credits them to the issuer’s account. Cost of the operation: a few dozen dollars in network fees. Of that supply, twenty-seven per cent went to public and private sale; the remaining seventy-three per cent, according to the white paper of June 27, 2024, stayed in pools the issuer controlled. The only way to pay for units in the initial sale was through an account on the exchange itself. A closed loop.
Here one must give the counterargument its due, because it is strong. Creating money from nothing is not, in itself, a crime. Every central bank on earth does it; commercial banks do it in the form of deposit money; exchange tokens as a class exist and have functioned for years. The European Union’s MiCA framework (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) expressly allows utility tokens issued against an honest white paper, and ZND’s paper was written in that convention and even disclosed conflicts of interest, though the offer fell within the transitional period before those provisions fully applied, so formal compliance is a separate analysis. The difference, then, is not in the printing; it is in what you do with what you print, and in what you tell the buyers. A central bank prints liabilities it answers for: it has a mandate, a balance sheet, and accountability. An ERC-20 issuer has a keyboard.
In the ZND affair, the printing served at least four functions at once. First: primary sale, the exchange of freshly minted units for other people’s money. Second: a settlement currency inside the ecosystem, used to pay for advertising, commissions, and listings and, according to press reports, to settle part of the foreign sponsorship contracts. Third: a substitute for interest in the earning program, of which more in a moment. Fourth: a balance-sheet item that flattered the results, of which more in the chapter after that. History knows this model from outside the crypto world. In the nineteenth century, mill owners paid their workers in scrip redeemable only at the company store; the truck system worked splendidly until the law, in England as early as the Truck Act of 1831, required wages in money that kept its value beyond the factory gate. Americans know the arrangement from “Sixteen Tons,” the ballad of a miner who grows older without ever growing solvent. An exchange-token ecosystem is a truck system with a white paper: the issuer is at once the mint, the store, and the currency booth, and the customer learns the exchange rate for the outside world only on trying to walk out through the gate.
Interest, Printed In-House
The Earn and Farming programs were advertised as a way to put a customer’s funds to work. The terms of service from July of 2025 allow that work to be described precisely. Under § 11.2, a participant in a subscription plan could elect to receive half or all of the rewards due to him in the ZND token; § 11.3 framed the election as a standing order to convert rewards into tokens at the rate on conversion day. Section 13.2 supplied the encouragement: a bonus, paid in the token, of ten per cent of the rewards’ value for the half option and twenty per cent for the full one.
Run the numbers on an example. A customer commits one bitcoin to the program for ninety days at five per cent per annum. The reward is 0.01233 BTC, roughly seven hundred and forty euros at the bitcoin price of about sixty thousand euros assumed here. In the classic variant, the company must hand the customer real bitcoin at the end of the quarter and deplete its reserves by that much. In the Farming variant, the customer receives the equivalent of seven hundred and forty euros in ZND plus a hundred and forty-eight euros of bonus, eight hundred and eighty-eight euros in all, except that the sum is counted on conversion day, and the company’s bitcoin reserves are not depleted at all: it reaches into the Ecosystem Incentives pool, fifteen per cent of the issue printed in full on day one, and pays from that stack. On the customer’s screen, 888 looks better than 740, so a rational person picks the option that suits the issuer. After the token fell by more than ninety-nine per cent, less than nine of those eight hundred and eighty-eight euros remain.
The mechanism had three systemic effects. First, the more customers chose rewards in the token, the fewer real assets the company had to hold against its own promises; a hard obligation in bitcoin became a soft obligation in house print. Second, the subscription plans locked up the committed assets for the plan’s term, and to the extent ZND was committed and paid out, that took supply off the market and propped up the price, and the price lent credibility to the next sale. Third, the program closed the loop: the customer brought real assets in and carried out units whose only natural market was the issuer’s own exchange. One of the victims put it briefly to the news site money.pl: the token “was sold as a sure promise,” with a share in the exchange’s profits and privileges in the background. A bank that paid interest in banknotes of its own manufacture would collide with the central bank’s monopoly on issue before it managed to print a second series. Here it was called a loyalty program.
What the Filings Say: A Token as an Earnings Machine
The most interesting thing about this affair is that the machine left tracks in documents the company itself filed with the Estonian registry. From an analysis of BB Trade Estonia OÜ’s 2024 annual report, discussed by money.pl, it emerges that ZND played three roles at once: a utility role (discounts and better terms in Earn, Staking, and Farming), a financial role (a presale that brought the company real value), and an internal settlement role (payments for advertising, commissions, and listings). The token sat simultaneously in assets, in liabilities, and in the income statement: the company’s own ZND was valued at close to eight million euros, presale obligations exceeded nine million euros, and token-linked revenue came to more than nineteen million euros against less than four million in costs settled in the currency.
And the key sentence: the openly reported positive contribution of ZND to the results was larger than the company’s entire net profit for 2024. Without the token, the company would have shown a loss. The bookkeeping exposes the asymmetry the whole model stands on: creating the token costs almost nothing, but selling it books as revenue in hard currency. We wrote one sentence about this in July that bears repeating today: the ZND price was not an ornament for the exchange; it was a line item.
The filings also say where the real value went while print took its place. As of December 31, 2024, the company reported 722.36 million euros in obligations to clients against 9.73 million euros in cash, a gap in which, for every euro in the till, there were more than seventy euros of other people’s claims; that comparison alone measures the liquidity buffer rather than total coverage, since the assets also listed cryptocurrencies and receivables, whose existence and collectability remain to be verified. Those receivables have a history of their own: loans to related parties grew from just over twelve million euros in 2023 to more than ninety-three million a year later, the largest position a seventy-five-million-euro loan in cryptocurrency, extended without collateral; advances to related parties rose over the same period from about eight million to more than thirty, and in the footnotes the company disclosed a “right to use client funds.” The report notes, finally, that after the balance-sheet date more than fifty-eight million euros of those loans were repaid in very short order. Honesty requires the caveat that the analyst quoted by money.pl also makes: the filings alone cannot assign these sums to particular beneficiaries; that takes flow data, which is what a criminal investigation exists to obtain. Documents money.pl obtained later added the sequel: over the course of 2025 alone, obligations to clients melted from 722 to 343 million euros, which has every feature of a classic run, except that it ran through an API. The direction of the picture is, in our assessment, unambiguous. This is not the annual report of an exchange that happens to have a token. It is the annual report of a mechanism in which real assets flowed out toward the ownership circle while, in the customers’ eyes, their place was taken by units from the printer and a narrative about an ecosystem.
FTT, CEL, and a Short History of House Money
Nothing in this construction is a Polish invention. FTT, the house token of the FTX exchange, served as collateral for internal loans: Alameda Research, the exchange’s affiliated trading firm, held enormous reserves of FTT and borrowed billions of dollars of customer deposits against them. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged outright that Caroline Ellison, at Sam Bankman-Fried’s direction, bought FTT on the open market to prop up its price, because the value of the collateral depended on it. When, in November of 2022, the market questioned that valuation, an eight-billion-dollar hole appeared in the balance sheet, and Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven counts, including fraud and money laundering.
The second precedent is CEL, the token of the lender Celsius Network. The independent examiner appointed by the bankruptcy court, the former federal prosecutor Shoba Pillay, found in her report of January 31, 2023, that the company had spent at least five hundred and fifty-eight million dollars buying back its own token, funded in part with customers’ bitcoin and ether; when the resulting shortfall in both coins surfaced in 2021, it was plugged with a further three hundred million dollars in stablecoins likewise acquired with customer deposits, and the founder made about $68.7 million selling CEL. The internal correspondence spoke for itself: one employee called the practice “very Ponzi like,” and the chief financial officer warned colleagues in writing that the buybacks might cross legal lines. The report stopped short of settling the legal label but laid out the evidence, including the finding that by June of 2022 withdrawals were being funded out of new customers’ deposits.
Set the three stories side by side and one common denominator emerges, along with one difference. The denominator is reflexivity: the token’s value depends on the issuer’s condition, and the issuer’s condition, as booked, depends on the token’s value. FTX pumped the price in order to borrow more against it. Celsius bought its token back in order to sustain belief. In the ZND case, as we showed from on-chain data, the investigative hypothesis is the mirror image: a price held high on the issuer’s own closed exchange drew fresh deposits in, while supply was shed onto outside markets in exchange for liquid assets. The difference is that the model can be immortal for as long as the issuer stays solvent; there are exchange tokens that have traded for years. A perpetual-motion machine built of print and faith runs until the day too many holders try to leave through the gate at once. That is when you find out how much the can really weighs.
What the Arrest Changes for the Victims
First, the Article 302 charge matters beyond the person of the suspect, because its premise is a state of looming insolvency in April of 2026 and discretionary control over who got paid; the remand order settles none of that, being an interim ruling. For customers who deposited funds in that period, including under the ZND price premium, the prosecution’s thesis, if it holds, feeds evidence into the fraud construction of Article 286 § 1 of the code: taking deposits while withdrawals are effectively shut is deception on a point that could hardly be more material. Second, according to media reports, Przemysław Kral is coöperating with prosecutors and is said to have sought the status of a “small crown witness,” the Polish plea mechanism that trades exhaustive testimony against confederates for extraordinary leniency; we wrote about that procedural game in July, and this week’s arrest fits it well, though there is no official confirmation of the status.
Third, the regulatory backdrop is worth seeing plainly. MiCA applies across the European Union directly, but Poland has still not designated the authority to enforce it, because the national crypto-assets act has been vetoed three times, most recently on June 11, 2026, and the override vote is only now returning to the Sejm, the lower house of parliament. We wrote separately about the costs of that vacuum; here it is enough to say that as long as administrative supervision hangs in the air, practically the whole weight of the case rests on criminal law and on the bankruptcy proceeding.
Fourth, and finally, the clocks are running. The Harju County Court in Tallinn declared BB Trade Estonia OÜ bankrupt on August 27, 2026; Margus Lentsius, until then the interim supervisor, was appointed trustee, claims must be filed within two months of the announcement, and the first creditors’ meeting is set for September 17th. The bankruptcy track and the criminal track complement each other, and neither replaces the other: filing a claim secures one’s position in the distribution of the estate, while the criminal case commands the machinery of asset freezes and international legal assistance. And one standing warning: anyone who contacts victims through a messenger app or from an unknown number and offers to recover the funds for an advance fee is another link in the fraud; we mapped the typology of such schemes in April.
The Air in the Can
Piero Manzoni, who opened this series, sold air with wit and with the consent of both parties to the transaction. Money from nothing shares one property with his cans: it keeps its value only as long as no one opens the lid. The overnight ruling in Katowice opens no cans, and it settles nothing. For now it establishes only this much: the question of who stood closest to the sealing machine, and who was allowed to carry his cans out without standing in line, has stopped being commentary and become a proceeding, with real instruments of compulsion behind it.
If you were harmed in the zondacrypto affair, including as a holder of the ZND token or a participant in the Earn and Farming programs, we invite you to contact the firm; we maintain a full compendium of the case at kancelaria-skarbiec.pl/afera-zondacrypto.
Legal and factual status as of August 29, 2026. Information about the charges comes from prosecutors’ communiqués and press publications; until a final judgment, all suspects enjoy the presumption of innocence. Findings drawn from external reports and media accounts have not been verified in court proceedings.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
