Vauld Said Nexo Deal Talks Had Failed as Nexo Made a Final Offer

Vauld told creditors on December 26, 2022 that its proposed acquisition by rival crypto lender Nexo had not come to fruition and that it was seeking a mutual end to the parties’ exclusivity arrangements. The message marked the apparent failure of a rescue process that had begun nearly six months earlier after Vauld suspended customer activity during a liquidity crisis.

The record was immediately complicated by Nexo. In an open letter dated December 26, Nexo said it remained committed to an acquisition and presented what it called a final amended proposal. The two companies therefore agreed that the previous negotiations had stalled but did not present a unified account of whether the transaction was definitively over.

That disagreement mattered because Vauld’s customers still could not access their account balances. The proposed acquisition had been one potential route for transferring customer claims and remaining assets to an operating platform. Its breakdown left creditors facing a longer, court-supervised restructuring with uncertain timing and recoveries.

A rescue process that never became a sale

Nexo and Vauld signed an indicative term sheet on July 5, 2022. Nexo’s announcement described a 60-day exclusive exploratory period during which it would conduct due diligence and consider acquiring up to 100% of Vauld. The document was preliminary and expressly conditioned any transaction on satisfactory diligence; it was not a completed acquisition agreement.

Vauld’s July restructuring materials said customer accounts had been suspended on July 4 amid liquidity pressure. Its October 21 creditor update still described the Nexo acquisition as a possibility being pursued in parallel with a restructuring proposal involving a professional crypto-asset fund manager. Vauld said the possible Nexo structure could transfer customer balances to Nexo, although its terms remained under discussion.

By December 26, no binding acquisition had been announced. Contemporaneous reporting based on Vauld’s creditor email said Vauld considered Nexo’s revised terms unsuitable and had resumed active work with shortlisted fund managers.

The companies offered conflicting explanations

Vauld’s email, as reported on December 26, said Nexo’s revised proposal lacked the early-exit mechanism Vauld considered important and set withdrawal conditions that Vauld believed most creditors could not reach. Vauld also said Nexo had not provided enough financial information for creditors to assess the risk of depending on Nexo’s solvency. Those were Vauld’s contemporaneous assertions, not independently adjudicated findings.

Nexo’s open letter disputed the process. It alleged that Vauld and restructuring adviser Kroll had supplied information slowly, mischaracterized Nexo’s terms and favored a fund-management alternative. Nexo said its final proposal would acquire Vauld’s customer base, relevant crypto assets, receivables, intellectual property and associated liabilities. These were proposal terms and company allegations; the letter did not establish creditor acceptance, Vauld’s consent or regulatory and court approval.

Nexo also proposed transferring initial asset allocations to new Nexo accounts and described performance-based routes for later withdrawals. The proposal acknowledged that services could be unavailable where a customer’s jurisdiction prohibited them. The surviving event-day documents did not quantify what each creditor would receive or when every balance would become withdrawable.

Why the breakdown mattered

The failed talks illustrated a central weakness exposed by the 2022 crypto-credit crisis: an acquisition announcement could not itself restore customer liquidity. Vauld’s assets and liabilities had different maturities, customer activity remained suspended, and any rescue still depended on diligence, negotiated allocation rules and a restructuring process involving creditors and Singapore’s courts.

The December 26 development therefore was not a completed sale or a finalized creditor recovery plan. It was the collapse of one negotiation track, accompanied by a last public effort from the prospective buyer to revive or reshape it.

Later confirmation

In a later Vauld Q&A covering a January 5, 2023 creditor webinar, the company confirmed that six months of acquisition discussions had not come to fruition and described the fund-manager route as the alternative under development. That later record corroborates Vauld’s December 26 position, but it does not resolve the parties’ competing allegations or retroactively make Nexo’s final proposal binding.