Crypto miner Poolin issues ‘IOUs’ after freezing withdrawals 

Chinese bitcoin mining giant Poolin will hand out IOU tokens to those impacted by frozen withdrawals.  

The IOUs are ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum and meant to mitigate the effect of the withdrawal suspensions, Poolin said in a blog post.

"Our priority, for the time being, is to resume withdrawals of as many coins/tokens as possible," the company said.

The IOUs come a week after Poolin paused withdrawals amid a liquidity crisis resulting from increasing demands on withdrawals, The Block previously reported. Other firms in the industry have paused withdrawals as well, such as crypto lenders Voyager and Vauld. Voyager has since begun restoring some access to customers.

There are six IOU tokens on Poolin: IOUBTC, IOUETH, IOUUSDT, IOULTC, IOUZEC and IOUDOGE. These IOUs are a 1:1 representation of the the BTC, ETH, USDT, LTC, ZEC and Doge that Poolin owes a user, either in the user’s asset account or mining account on Poolin.  

For instance, if a user holds 5 BTC in their asset account and 20,000 Doge in their mining account, the user will receive 5 IOUBTC and 20,000 IOUDoge. Receiving these IOU tokens sets the user’s original holdings to zero. 

Poolin's IOU portion distribution will begin on Sept. 15, where users can withdraw their IOU tokens at any time and an unlimited amount of times. The miner said it will announce the token address, token symbol and token decimal of the IOU tokens soon.