What it was
Voyager was a retail crypto brokerage that also paid interest on deposits. Customers bought bitcoin and other assets on the app, left them there, and were paid a yield of up to 12 per cent on some of them. It was the rare entry in this batch that was a public company: Voyager Digital Ltd. was incorporated under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia), listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange from 23 September 2019 as VYGR, and moved to the Toronto Stock Exchange as VOYG on 7 September 2021 with 161,095,671 shares outstanding.
What happened
On 1 July 2022 Voyager suspended trading, deposits and withdrawals. On 6 July 2022, according to Vermont's Department of Financial Regulation, Voyager and its US affiliates commenced Chapter 11 proceedings in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The Toronto Stock Exchange delisted the shares on 17 August 2022 for failure to meet continued listing requirements.
Voyager's filings, as summarised by the Vermont regulator, stated that the company did not keep a separate wallet per customer. Everything went into a commingled wallet and was swept to a third-party custodian. That single design fact is most of the story of what account holders could and could not get back.
What regulators alleged and what was settled
The Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with the Voyager companies on 12 October 2023 and filed suit against the former chief executive, Stephen Ehrlich, over claims that customer accounts were insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The companies accepted a permanent ban on handling consumer assets and a judgment of $1.65 billion, suspended so that remaining assets could return to customers through the bankruptcy. The court entered that order on 23 November 2023. In June 2025 the FTC announced a stipulated order under which Ehrlich and his wife pay $2.8 million and he accepts a ban on selling retail crypto products.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission separately charged Ehrlich with fraud and registration failures in the Southern District of New York in October 2023. The stipulated order records that the corporate defendants neither admit nor deny any of the allegations in the complaint, and the entry is tagged Scandal rather than Fraud for that reason. Listing here is not endorsement.