Chainge Finance's Cross-Chain Vaults Have Stayed Sealed Since December

User assets remain locked inside Chainge Finance's cross-chain system, with the team blaming "blacklisted vaults" and corrupted databases in what has become a months-long pattern of deflection. Founder DJ Qian keeps issuing Telegram assurances — "I'll pay you back personally" — reminiscent of the pledges he made before his earlier venture, Multichain, collapsed with $126 million in user funds unaccounted for. Meanwhile the app keeps accepting new deposits, and moderators reportedly ban users who push too hard for answers.

Credit: Chainge, DJ Qian, CoinMarketCap, IQ.Wiki, Decrypt

Chainge Finance doesn't call itself a bridge, and technically it isn't one — it markets what it calls "cross-chain roaming." Rather than wrapping tokens, the system routes assets to addresses controlled by its own multi-node infrastructure: funds on the source chain sit locked in a Chainge-controlled vault while a distributed set of key-holders sign off on releasing the equivalent amount on the destination chain. The marketing calls this "Universal Assets with cross-chain superpowers," but the design concentrates all risk into a single point of failure — the signing process itself. If the key-holders stop signing, movement stops entirely, leaving assets stranded inside a closed, proprietary system built entirely on trust in Chainge's infrastructure (referred to as DCRM).

That appears to be exactly what happened: the signing halted, and with it, the roaming.

Fusion Protocol — DJ Qian's other project, and the infrastructure underpinning this cross-chain system — has held ETH, BTC, and USDT in limbo since the December holiday period. Users describe watching withdrawal requests sit indefinitely in "pending" status, their transaction hashes serving as a record of funds that never moved. Behind the scenes, the explanations keep shifting: "blacklisted vaults" one day, "liquidity issues" the next, "bad actors exploited us" whenever the previous story stops holding up. In each version, the team's own access seems to work fine while users remain locked out.

No Sign of Trouble on the Front End

Nothing on the Chainge dashboard suggests anything is wrong — no warning banner, no disabled deposit button, no notice that withdrawals might not return. The interface keeps functioning normally, continuing to accept new users' money. Chainge's public social accounts have said nothing about the situation since mid-February: no tweet acknowledging a problem, no Medium post with technical detail, no email advising users to pause deposits. When Rekt News anonymously asked a Chainge Telegram moderator whether the platform was still taking deposits, the moderator confirmed it was.

The official Telegram shows a pattern of selective moderation — some complaints stay visible, others disappear:

"My transaction on ETH is stuck for 6 days now what can I do?" — one user, back in March

"Why can't I withdraw my coins from the wallet?" — a recurring question

"I asked for a refund on the source chain 3 months ago. I can still see the token sitting in the Chainge wallet." — another recent complaint

Users who push for real answers are typically met with variations on "soon," "the team is working on it," or "we've been working on legal solutions." A number have been banned outright, but the substance of the responses hasn't changed. DJ Qian has floated a personal $5 million bailout repeatedly, without it ever materializing. What began as ordinary support tickets has since escalated into forum threads, scattered Telegram discussion, and organized attempts to trace the movement of funds on-chain.

The Victims Organize

Being banned from Chainge's official channels hasn't stopped affected users from organizing elsewhere. A dedicated Telegram group launched on February 1st as a gathering point for people locked out of their funds, where banned users compare notes freely. The chat has filled with transaction hashes, frozen balances, and reports of unresponsive support — and it has gradually turned from a support space into something closer to an investigations unit, with members tracking wallet activity, archiving DJ Qian's past statements, and cataloguing each new excuse as it appears.

On April 26th, Qian's official explanations reached a new extreme: "My personal funds are invested in a crypto fund. My early withdrawal violates the terms." Months have passed with promises but no repayments. The $5 million refund is perpetually "next week," pending unspecified "procedural issues."

Confidence in the project has eroded elsewhere too — Kas.FYI ended its partnership with Chainge after its wrapped Kaspa token lost more than half its peg value, which it attributed to a "sever liquidity crisis on Chainge," and advised users to steer clear until the issue is resolved. With Chainge's team communicating only through Telegram and DJ Qian largely unreachable, affected users have effectively been left to investigate on their own.

A Familiar Pattern

DJ Qian's track record reads as a list of prior projects: founder of BitSE (the company behind VeChain and QTUM), founder and CEO of Fusion, and co-founder of AnySwap, which later became Multichain. Multichain is the project most relevant here — the cross-chain bridge lost $126 million of user funds in 2023 after unidentified "insiders" drained its MPC wallets. Its CEO disappeared around that time and was later taken into custody by Chinese authorities.

At the time of the Multichain hack, Qian described it as "another hack," paused Fantom swaps "as a precaution," and told users the rest of Chainge remained "safe." Even as Multichain was still unraveling in July 2023, Qian was already recruiting for his next venture, writing: "Let's welcome the core developer zhenyu who developed the router and part of anycall for multichain. Welcome onboard Chainge!" The overlap in personnel and architecture between the two projects is direct — effectively the same underlying system under new branding, still built around a small group controlling the signing keys and vaults.

Serious capital backed this next iteration: Chainge raised $13 million in 2024 from investors including Gem Digital and Alpha Token Capital, who have since gone quiet as user funds remain stuck in the protocol's contracts. The on-chain data doesn't line up with a simple liquidity crunch either — declining TVL hasn't been matched by a corresponding volume of user withdrawals, suggesting funds exited through channels other than normal user-initiated transfers. Between October 24th and 26th alone, TVL fell from $65 million to under $14 million in two days.

The address believed to be Chainge's main vault, 0x66ff2f0AC3214758D1e61B16b41e3d5e62CAEcF1, holds close to 39% of the total token supply — by far the largest known holding. Chainge has never publicly confirmed this address belongs to it, though it is widely identified as the project's primary vault or proxy across community discussion and Telegram chats; the project does not disclose any of its wallet addresses publicly beyond the ones used for user deposits. Despite withdrawals having stalled for many users since December, that suspected vault address has seen its balance fall from around $16 million to just over $2 million — indicating the funds moved somewhere, just not back to users.

Chainge is registered in the British Virgin Islands, a jurisdiction known for minimal regulatory oversight. Its terms of service disclaim responsibility outright: "We are not liable for any damages, losses or costs in connection with this app, including but not limited to, user error, downtime, or failed transactions." In short, users bear the risk entirely.

Board appointments were presumably meant to lend the project credibility: Mike Lempres, formerly Coinbase's Chief Legal & Risk Officer and chair of Silvergate Bank, and Dr. Najam Kidwai, a digital-assets investor and former SPAC chair, both joined with strong resumes. Beyond appearing in the announcement, neither appears to have exercised much active oversight, and both reportedly resigned in April, citing "continuous harassment from certain community members." DJ Qian remains in place, still promising the $5 million rescue package that has yet to appear.

Months after the freeze began, the promises continue while the transaction hashes documenting stuck funds sit unchanged. The pattern tracks closely with what happened at Multichain: one project fails, another launches under the same leadership, and users are left wondering which protocol will be built next. Whether DJ Qian eventually makes users whole, unlocks the "blacklisted" vaults, or produces the promised legal resolution remains to be seen — but the more straightforward explanation is that Chainge currently lacks either the liquidity or the intention to repay what it owes. The clearest warning sign remains that deposits are still being accepted even as withdrawals stay frozen. What's notable here isn't that Chainge became yet another dead end for cross-chain funds — it's a reminder that the same failure mode remains possible across the sector as new "interoperability" protocols continue to launch.