A lawsuit brought by former customers of Singapore crypto exchange Tokenize Xchange against the platform’s founder and former chief operating officer will be heard in the Singapore High Court, not in private arbitration. On 10 April 2026, Deputy Registrar Teo Guan Siew dismissed the two defendants’ applications to stay the case in favour of arbitration, in a decision published as Low Jun Hong and others v Hong Qi Yu and another [2026] SGHCR 11.
The claim, HC/OC 984/2025, is a representative action filed by six named claimants on behalf of 272 people who held accounts on Tokenize Xchange ([2026] SGHCR 11 at [3]). The exchange was operated by AmazingTech Pte Ltd (ATPL), a Singapore company that was wound up by the High Court in September 2025. The defendants are Hong Qi Yu, described in the judgment as ATPL’s founder and director, and Erin Koo Kee Hoon, described as its chief operating officer and Hong Qi Yu’s wife (at [4]). The claimants contend she was an employee of ATPL only until April 2021 (at [21]).
The ruling decides only where the dispute will be heard. It makes no finding on the customers’ allegations, which have not been tested at trial.
What the Customers Allege
According to the judgment, the account holders are suing the two former managers for fraudulent misrepresentation and, in the alternative, unlawful conspiracy (at [13]). The judgment lists three areas the alleged misrepresentations covered: whether ATPL ran the exchange through a central order book, whether it kept its own assets separate from customer assets, and licensing matters, including the status of ATPL’s licence application to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).
The customers want compensation for the money and crypto they deposited on the exchange but were later unable to withdraw (at [13]). The published judgment does not state the total sum claimed.
Hong Qi Yu also faces a criminal case. The judgment records that he was charged on 31 July 2025 with fraudulent trading under section 238(4) of the Insolvency, Restructuring and Dissolution Act 2018 (IRDA) in connection with ATPL’s operation of Tokenize, and that those proceedings are pending (at [10]). A charge is not a conviction.
How Tokenize Xchange Collapsed
The background is set out in Justice Philip Jeyaretnam’s winding-up decision in Duncan, Cameron Lindsay and others v AmazingTech Pte Ltd [2025] SGHC 195, dated 30 September 2025. ATPL, incorporated in 2016, operated an exchange that supported trading and custody of upwards of 130 digital assets (at [5]). The judgment traces the insolvency to events in July 2025 (at [7]). The judgment records that in mid-July, MAS rejected ATPL’s application for a licence to provide digital payment token services. Amid customer complaints about delayed instructions, MAS identified that the company may not have held enough assets and that customer assets may not have been properly segregated, contrary to what ATPL had stated in its licence application. The company’s sole director was charged with fraudulent trading on 31 July, and on 1 August MAS and the Singapore Police Force issued a joint statement saying there were signs the company lacked sufficient assets to meet customer claims ([2026] SGHCR 11 at [10] and [11]).
On an application by a group of creditors, HC/OA 828/2025, the court placed ATPL under interim judicial management on 15 August 2025 ([2025] SGHC 195 at [1], [6]). The interim judicial managers reported that the company was insolvent and had no revenue, could not lawfully resume operations after its licence application was rejected, and may have engaged in wrongful trading while insolvent, a matter liquidators could investigate (at [18]). Justice Jeyaretnam granted the winding-up application, HC/CWU 356/2025, and appointed the interim judicial managers as liquidators (at [60]).
The winding-up judgment also indicates scale. Two competing creditor groups backed different liquidator candidates: one reported support from 203 creditors with about S$61.4 million in combined claims, the other from 233 creditors with about S$45.4 million (at [26]). The court noted that one group of creditors was then contemplating a class action against the company’s management for fraud (at [47]).
Why the Arbitration Stay Failed
To open a Tokenize account, each claimant had to enter into a Customer Service Agreement (CSA) with ATPL, and clause 26.2 of that agreement sends disputes to arbitration administered by the Singapore International Arbitration Centre ([2026] SGHCR 11 at [5] and [6]). The difficulty for the defendants was that they were not parties to the CSA. They tried to rely on it as third parties under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 2001 (CRTPA).
The founder argued that the CSA’s indemnity and exclusion-of-liability clauses, which name ATPL’s directors as beneficiaries, carried the arbitration clause with them under section 9(1) of the CRTPA (at [15] to [17]). The former COO adopted those points and added that clause 34.6 of the CSA gave such third parties a right to arbitrate under section 9(2) (at [19] and [20]).
The Deputy Registrar rejected each argument. The indemnity point appeared only in written submissions and described a claim that had not yet crystallised (at [39] to [41]). On the exclusion clause, drawing on the English Court of Appeal’s decision in Fortress Value Recovery Fund I LLC v Blue Skye Special Opportunities Fund LP, he held that a third party can raise such a clause as a defence in court, and found no clear language in the CSA confining that defence to arbitration (at [42] to [44]). Clause 34.6, read literally, did not give third parties a right to enforce the arbitration clause (at [46] and [47]). Both applications were dismissed with costs (at [49]).
"For the reasons set out above, my decision was that Hong and Koo, as non-parties to the CSA, could not rely on the arbitration agreement in the CSA," by Deputy Registrar Teo Guan Siew of the Singapore High Court, [2026] SGHCR 11 at [49].
A further request by the founder to pause the civil case because of his pending criminal case also failed. The court held that it was for him to show the lawsuit would prejudice his criminal case, and that a single unsupported line in his sworn evidence did not do so (at [48]).
"The law is clear: the mere fact of parallel criminal proceedings does not give rise to an automatic right to a stay of the civil proceedings; instead it is a matter of judicial discretion whether to stay proceedings," by Deputy Registrar Teo Guan Siew of the Singapore High Court, [2026] SGHCR 11 at [48].
What It Means for Exchanges and Their Customers
For crypto platforms, the decision is a reminder that an arbitration clause in customer terms binds the contracting company, not automatically its directors and officers. Naming directors as beneficiaries of exclusion and indemnity clauses did not, on its own, let them move a customer’s claim out of court. Legal teams drafting customer agreements should check who their terms actually allow to invoke arbitration, because courts require clear wording before reading in such a right.
The concerns recorded in the winding-up judgment, namely, whether customer assets were segregated, whether the firm held sufficient assets to meet claims, and whether its operations matched what it stated in its licence application to MAS, are basic controls for any custodial platform. Firms operating under Singapore’s evolving Payment Services Act regime should keep segregation records on the assumption that a court may one day read them.
For the 272 account holders, the ruling means their claim against the people who ran Tokenize can proceed in open court, separately from the liquidation of ATPL. Whether the alleged misrepresentations were made, and whether they caused the losses claimed, remains to be decided.
Read the full judgments: [2026] SGHCR 11 and [2025] SGHC 195.
