A Letter to The Linqto Community

Dear Linqto Community: 

I’m Dan Siciliano, CEO of Linqto.  As many of you know, I was hired by Bill Sarris, the outgoing CEO, and the board. I started at Linqto on January 2, 2025. 

It’s an understatement to say this has been a difficult year for Linqto customers. A freeze of the platform and then a bankruptcy filing was certainly not what any of us expected or wanted. The new executive team was hired to drive new growth at Linqto and take it to the next level. Instead, we uncovered shocking misconduct that systematically defrauded customers and was built into the platform itself. As a result, we had to pause the Linqto platform to both safeguard the assets and to prevent further crimes from occurring. Believe me, no one saw that coming, least of all me! 

I’ve spoken with some of you directly and several more of you in small groups – sometimes in contentious (but productive) exchanges and sometimes just answering questions. I could fill pages and pages with explanations and finger pointing, share legal letters from regulators, corporate documents, internal emails, and marketing materials – all of which show a despicable and intentional pattern of lies and in many cases, clear-cut fraud, which was ongoing for years.  

In fact, John Deaton chronicles a lot of this in his class action lawsuit against Bill Sarris, the former CEO of Linqto, a case that over 3,000 of you have joined. I urge you to read it. You are victims of malicious mismanagement and repeated securities laws violations.   

The bottom line is that we had no choice but to restructure the company to preserve the value of your claims (I call them investments). Anything less than Chapter 11 would have risked forced recission from the SEC or liquidation at below market rates- outcomes that we all reject as unfair. 

That’s enough looking backward. What’s done is done – and we need to try to make it right. That is our mantra these days: move on and try to make it right. 

I want to focus on what’s happening right now in the bankruptcy process and what you can expect over the next few weeks and months.   

First, let me state the obvious: Chapter 11 bankruptcy can be a messy process and hard to understand, and despite my training as a lawyer and economist, I have been shocked by the complexity of it all. It’s hard not to be angry and frustrated as each step is full of filings and dockets and motions and responses (and costs — so many costs). That said, I’ve come to learn that there are ways to move faster, reduce costs, and get more for customers. 

So here’s where we are: 

On August 19, we announced an Agreement in Principle with the unsecured creditors committee (“Committee”) on the options customers will have for their claims and a pathway forward to recovery. Our intention is to work with the Committee, co-creating a plan that they think is best for customers, so we can exit bankruptcy quickly. Fighting over a plan is not in the best interests of anyone – it takes time and money – which we would rather preserve for Linqto customers. 

We hope there will be more than one option to choose from, which is important, because not every customer has the same issues to resolve. Linqto management is fighting for options that specifically preserve value for non-accredited investors – those are the customers that may be more at risk. We believe options need to be available that serve non-accredited and accredited equally. 

I won’t jump ahead because conversations with our legal team are at a very delicate phase, but it’s not going to be a surprise that one of the options will hopefully be relaunching Linqto as a closed-end fund.   

There are a few other motions and objections that have been filed with the court that could be addressed but likely will be deferred a week to allow for the conclusion of the work with the Committee. The two most notable that have received a great deal of attention are: 

• Objections for Linqto to use the $18.9 million cash from the January 2025 Ripple tender proceeds to fund the bankruptcy 

• Request for approval on the $60 million debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing designed to provide the necessary resources to help Linqto to emerge from bankruptcy with a clear future path 

Each of these are complex issues and I fully appreciate and value the questions being asked about the decisions we made to obtain the DIP financing and to use the Ripple tender proceeds. In fact, the judge is reading all your filings, and it is your collective voice that will play a role in the ultimate resolution of these two items.   

Challenges 

One of the real challenges to quickly creating equitable and satisfactory options is the difficult fact that prior management never created the proper structure to hold your investments. The “SPVs” that prior management said they had created to hold your investments were simply not established. We do not know why. We’re still in disbelief that the Linqto platform was operating completely outside legal norms.   

While we can’t just set up SPVs to fix this, what we are doing is working hard to develop a solution that acknowledges your financial position. Specifically, we want you to realize the full value of your claim, not only at the price you purchased. A closed-end fund will potentially be that solution.   

Final thoughts 

In conclusion, there’s been so much said and written and so much hate spewed that I want to encourage us to instead focus on what we all share as a common goal: to exit bankruptcy with as much recovery as possible for all customers.   

One sad part of all of this is the threats directed at Linqto employees trying their best to clean up this mess. My family and I, for example, have been threatened with physical violence and subjected to cyberattacks and doxxing.  Even our dog was mysteriously poisoned. Abusive and ominously violent videos have surfaced online directed at Linqto and sometimes just at me. I have had to file FBI reports and take measures to protect myself and my family. I am hopeful that calmer heads will soon prevail. Let’s focus on recovery by customers over the next few weeks and ignore direct or implied calls for violence and harassment. 

I will continue to send updates like this when there is relevant news.   

Finally, people ask me all the time why I’m doing this. Why stick around? It is probably worth noting that the new senior team was never granted any equity (due to the SEC issues and bankruptcy). I have no equity, and no options in Linqto. There is no secret plan. No offshore account. I suppose the simplest answer is that I’m doing this because I am drawn to defend the underdog. I want to prove that we can survive this debacle, that customers can get what they thought they had, and that Linqto’s basic idea of access to the private markets for all is so important and so powerful that it can survive even when it was (for years) turned on its head to hurt the people it was meant to help. Like you, I want to fight for what seems right even in a noisy and complicated world and, in the end, revive something valuable and enduring that we can all be a part of. 

Best, 

Dan 

Dan Siciliano 
CEO, Linqto