- Datavault AI told the SEC it has not been able to withdraw bitcoin from the Biconomy exchange since June, and will restate past accounts.
- The correction cuts reported assets by $92.2m as at the end of 2025 and by $49m as at June 2026.
- Shares closed down about 50% at $0.067. The company presents it as an accounting correction, not a theft, and Biconomy has not commented.
Plenty of listed companies now tell you they hold bitcoin. Far fewer have ever had to prove they can move it. Datavault AI told US regulators this week that it has been trying since June, and that the transfer still has not gone through.
A line on a balance sheet saying “bitcoin” tells you a company’s accountants were satisfied with how the holding was recorded. It does not tell you the coins sit in a wallet the company controls, or that anyone can get them out of where they are. Datavault’s shares lost roughly half their value in a single session on the day that gap became public.
This matters beyond one small-cap company, because the same question applies to every firm that has announced a bitcoin treasury: where are the coins, who is holding them, and has anybody moved them lately?
What the filing describes
The arrangement started in September 2025. Scilex Holding Company agreed to buy $150m of Datavault shares and warrants, and to pay for them in bitcoin rather than cash.
Scilex then credited 1,309.04 BTC to Datavault’s account at the Biconomy exchange through off-chain transfers. That phrase carries the whole story. An off-chain transfer is not a bitcoin transaction at all: it is an entry in an exchange’s own database, moving a balance from one customer’s column to another’s. Nothing touches the public , so nothing about it can be checked by anyone outside the exchange. It is fast and free, which is why exchanges offer it, and it depends entirely on the exchange being good for the balance it has written down.
Datavault later sold 491.4 BTC back to Scilex for about $40.5m in cash, which did settle. In June 2026 it asked to move bitcoin out to an external account. According to the filing, that transfer could not be completed, and it remained incomplete when the document was filed last week.
What a restatement actually is
Restating means going back and republishing figures a company has already told the market, because they were wrong when they were published. It is not a write-down of something that happened today.
Datavault now says the bitcoin credited through Scilex’s investment should have been recorded as a receivable, an amount Scilex still owes for the shares, rather than as a crypto asset the company holds. That is the company’s own explanation of why its previous accounts were wrong, and the restated figures have not yet been filed. On its numbers, the change reduces reported assets by $92.2m as at 31 December 2025 and by $49m as at 30 June 2026, and cuts shareholders’ equity accordingly. The company also says it had been treating those balances as funds it could draw on to keep operating, and must now reconsider that.
Two sets of books, then, covering periods that are already closed. The money did not vanish on Tuesday. What changed on Tuesday is what investors were told about the previous eighteen months.
What has not been established
Nobody has alleged a hack. No cause for the failed withdrawal has been confirmed, Biconomy has not said anything publicly, and it did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment. Whether the bitcoin exists in a recoverable form anywhere is not something the public record answers, because off-chain credits leave no trail an outsider can follow.
One detail in the paperwork is worth putting next to another. Scilex’s own June 2026 quarterly report says it sold $200m of shares in its subsidiary Semnur to Biconomy in exchange for bitcoin, and used $150m of that bitcoin to buy the Datavault securities. Read alongside Datavault’s filing, that describes bitcoin originating at the same venue where it was then credited and where it has since been stuck. Both sides of that are each company’s account of its own dealings, filed with the SEC but not independently corroborated.
For ordinary holders the practical lesson is the familiar one about getting money off an exchange: a balance shown in an account is a promise from the venue, and the only way to test a promise is to try withdrawing.
What to watch
The restated accounts themselves. The figures announced in an 8-K are the company’s estimate; the audited versions, and whatever the auditors say about the firm’s ability to keep operating, will tell you considerably more.
After that, two things. Whether Biconomy explains why the withdrawal has not completed, which is the only thing that would turn this from a disclosure into a resolved story. And whether any regulator takes an interest in the structure of the original share sale. Nothing in the available reporting suggests an inquiry has been opened.