Crypto miner Poolin issues ‘IOUs’ after freezing withdrawals 

Quick Take

  • Poolin users will receive IOUs representing holdings in their asset or mining account. 
  • Those should be used to mitigate the effect of last week’s freeze on withdrawals amid the miner’s liquidity crisis.

Chinese bitcoin mining giant Poolin will hand out IOU tokens to those impacted by frozen withdrawals.  

The IOUs are ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum and meant to mitigate the effect of the withdrawal suspensions, Poolin said in a blog post.

"Our priority, for the time being, is to resume withdrawals of as many coins/tokens as possible," the company said.

The IOUs come a week after Poolin paused withdrawals amid a liquidity crisis resulting from increasing demands on withdrawals, The Block previously reported. Other firms in the industry have paused withdrawals as well, such as crypto lenders Voyager and Vauld. Voyager has since begun restoring some access to customers.

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There are six IOU tokens on Poolin: IOUBTC, IOUETH, IOUUSDT, IOULTC, IOUZEC and IOUDOGE. These IOUs are a 1:1 representation of the the BTC, ETH, USDT, LTC, ZEC and Doge that Poolin owes a user, either in the user’s asset account or mining account on Poolin.  

For instance, if a user holds 5 BTC in their asset account and 20,000 Doge in their mining account, the user will receive 5 IOUBTC and 20,000 IOUDoge. Receiving these IOU tokens sets the user’s original holdings to zero. 

Poolin's IOU portion distribution will begin on Sept. 15, where users can withdraw their IOU tokens at any time and an unlimited amount of times. The miner said it will announce the token address, token symbol and token decimal of the IOU tokens soon.


© 2023 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X @MManoylov and on LinkedIn.