Singaporean Exchange COSS Announces Acquisition, Hopes to Regain Customers’ Trust 

COSS, one of the lesser-known cryptocurrency exchanges in the market, has announced its acquisition by an unknown investor but current customers are still uncertain about the company’s future. According to a press release published earlier this week, the firm explained that it had been acquired by an unspecified investor, in a process which began as a fundraising round and ended with its outright acquisition. In the release, the exchange made sure to point out that its new owner holds a complete stake in its venture, and will be bringing its “decades of cumulative professional experience in financial technology, trading, exchange platforms, and global markets” to the company.

Unknown Investors Hope to Steer the Ship in the Right Direction 

Buoyed by this new investment, the firm now hopes to build a strong relationship that will help it drive its vision and broaden its ecosystem with the addition of new features and functionalities to its platform. 

The prospects of that happening, however, are rather slim- especially considering everything the company’s customers have been through since the year began. 

An acronym for Crypto One Stop Solution, COSS was launched in 2017 with headquarters in Singapore. The platform started with a lot of promise, providing trading to retail and institutional investors in over 50 digital assets, with wallet functionalities and support for Initial Exchange Offerings (IEOs). 

Slim Chance of Survival for COSS

However, things took a turn for the worse on January 8, 2020, as the firm suddenly announced in a press release that it would be locking down the funds belonging to all its estimated 200,000 plus customers. Without warning and with no prospects for release, the firm seized its customers’ funds- amounting to about $2 million at the time, for a month. 

Withdrawals, trading, and deposits were shut down, immediately setting off fears among users that the exchange and its operators were orchestrating an exit scam. The exchange denied the allegations and explained that it was simply shutting down to implement some system-wide upgrades. 

Speaking with Decrypt, a spokesperson for the firm explained, “[The exchange] has been a mess. Now we are cleaning it up and hence this decision of shutting it down for four weeks and getting clean code that’s scalable, which works, and which suits the industry today.” The spokesperson added that information was withheld to prevent a mass exodus from the exchange, although the management had been planning the closure for months.  

Besides shutting its customers out of their accounts, skepticism persists as investors still don’t know if or when they will have access to their funds. There’s a high probability that the exchange’s management believes that releasing the funds- if they’re still even intact, that is- will still lead to the same mass exodus that they tried so hard to prevent in the first place. 

Given how people react when they feel threatened, it’s most probable that some parties will pull their funds and migrate to some other exchange.