Yes, please do that. I think I'm not the only one interested to look into.

I'll see what can be done about that. I'm not certain that has been filed yet due to the ongoing audit. But I'll find out for sure and get back to you on it.

Keep in mind that you were neither shareholders nor investors in VHL. If you held VIVA assets purchased from TQ, you bought a product from VHL with TQ functioning as the middleman. This means there was and is a huge debt that TQ (meaning me) owes to VHL (me, Dawn, a few others) and sussing out the size of that debt is another part of the audits. This is half of the problem I described as an insolvency.

Since I'm not familiar with US laws, could you also enlighten me why VHL did not formally reported the insolvency issue (bankruptcy) to the authorities ?

TradeQwik wasn't ever a professional exchange. It was experimental software in beta test mode intended to power an economic engine of my own devising.

You have to start somewhere and we based TQ on what appeared to be a very solid opensource software solution. That software had a bug; the bug ate > 100% of reserves and thus also ate VHL's share of ICO funds in as much as said funds were on deposit with TQ.

TradeQwik was run as a sole proprietorship because there was no formal operating agreement between anyone, not even Dawn and myself. While there were negotiations to transfer to a partnership structure, with Joe and Rick being full partners, those negotiations never bore fruit and once the bug was uncovered I did not feel comfortable passing the buck. I still don't. We will get through this and turn lemons to lemonade.

There is a HUGE difference in between insolvency and bankruptcy.

Insolvency is any condition where you do not have immediate resources to pay current obligations such as operating expenses and salaries. For example, if you have to pay your electric bill and you don't have funds to cover it in your checking account, you are insolvent. You'll remain insolvent until you have enough in your checking account to pay the bill and get it paid.

This is an important distinction, because you can be partially or totally insolvent. TQ was partially insolvent. We could not pay operating expenses. The server hosting alone was $1,000s per month. We managed to reduce this to $500 per month and that helped. But it didn't solve the problem entirely.

Bankruptcy is a legal remedy for insolvency. It is not the only remedy, nor is it the only legal remedy. A loan, a share sale, a bond etc, are all equally valid remedies as is obtaining a legal claim against a debtor such as a court order directing those who owe you money to pay up or be jailed for contempt.

Bankruptcy should only be considered as a last resort.

Our insolvency was triggered by a bug in the code that ate all our reserves and gave it to our customers as free money.

Fortunately, most of the people who took advantage of the bug indicated a willingness to return funds if we could demonstrate they were found to have been a culprit.

Partial insolvency was exacerbated by the fact that I ceased accepting new deposits in order to prevent a full insolvency that would have impinged on customer funds. In otherwords, had we kept going with the withdrawal bug, this would have turned into a ponzi quickly. I stopped it before it came to that.

While we had no reserves left and thus were insolvent; a quick examination of the relevant blockchains showed we had just barely enough to cover customer balances if you summed deposits, subtracted withdrawals and factored in trades.

Independent proof of this was needed though and hiring a CPA to try and untangle who held what was not a viable option.

As for the rest of your question. Here in the USA, bankruptcy is a legal remedy against insolvency intended to protect the debtor not the creditors per se. It specifically exists to put a stop to individual creditor claims against a debtor, such as the aforementioned "Pay or be held in contempt" order I mentioned earlier.

Under US Law an individual may declare bankruptcy once every seven years under one of two chapters. Chapter 7 is liquidation.

Under liquidation all assets of the debtor are declared property of the court and seized; from there, these assets are divided amongst creditors proportional to their share of what is owed in aggregate and then the remaining balance is dismissed.

I have no assets to speak of, thus there is nothing to seize. But I did transfer assets to fiduciaries partly as a way to ensure that no customer funds would end up in the hands of debt collectors nor spurned people who felt they might have a valid claim as a debtor, employee, partner or other insider and try to assert it over the customers. I appear to have made a mistake clarifying that point with Rick, but I'm certain we'll get that resolved.

This was intended to be a very short term remedy to something that looked like a small bug, but turned out to be structural.

Chapter 13 is a restructuring. Under Chapter 13 no assets are seized, but they are frozen and the court orders that you undergo the same process we have here. A full audit of the books, and a negotiated repayment plan to all creditors. This repayment plan continues usually for 3 to 5 years at which time the bankruptcy is declared to be over and all remaining claims are dismissed.

Under bankruptcy law you would be considered a creditor, not an investor. You purchased cryptographic tokens and misc assets designed to track those tokens in terms of purchasing power parity by scaling the quantity of another asset contained therein. You did this for the purpose of speculating on a change in their price; you did not invest money nor deposit in the sense that you might with a professional broker dealer or a bank. It is a crucial distinction that seems to have been lost in all of the commotion.

It works in your favor in the event of a bankruptcy whether voluntary or forced, because investors, partners, insiders etc are always last to get anything while a creditor would be waiting in line with the remaining creditors, but stands a chance of at least getting something.

In my opinion a bankruptcy is an expensive and time consuming operation and having been on the wrong side of a bankruptcy where I was owed tens of thousands of dollars; I can tell you it is rare to see all creditors repaid let alone investors. The average is a $0.01 on the dollar. Furthermore those who owed money to the entity whether fiduciaries or beneficiaries of an accounting error could have their assets seized globally by a US Federal Bankruptcy Court and said assets sold to repay their debt to the entity that filed for bankruptcy. I'm trying hard to avoid that situation.

We avoid that by using an equally valid, arbitration process that presents a lot of very good alternatives.

In the whitepaper I designed VIVA to have a failure mode which functions in many ways like a Chapter 13 without the need to involve a court. According to the white paper, under the VIVA model; should a mint fail, the customer balances are carried over to remaining mints and the mints work with the insolvent mint owner to establish a repayment plan. This repayment plan can include freezing and intercepting all funds that would have normally gone to the mint owner and preventing transfer of his/her crowns. With TRs being sunk or sold until repayment is completed. This method works better than a bankruptcy because the failed mint owner's, Crowns, TRs, liquid VIVA and VIP are all used to repay the other mints who had to carry the customers. This Crown freeze would release after 5 years whether the Crown Holder actively participated or not, due to TR sinking and the fact our blockchain doesn't hold debt for more than 5 years.

The only mints in existence at the time were mine and they were not working correctly. Therefore that option didn't become an option I would not use that anyways.

Yet there have been lessons learned and I designed AVIV to be even more resilient against exchange collapse and TQNext itself is designed to be impossible to collapse.

So to answer your partially unasked question. Why didn't we just file for bankruptcy (notify the authorities of our insolvency)

The only thing a court would do in the case of tradeqwik whether Chapter 7 or 13 is stop further litigation against the person seeking protection and the court would order either a liquidation or a restructuring. We're already going beyond what those remedies would necessitate and thus we haven't bothered the court with it.

More importantly, I made a promise to take full responsibility for the state of things and make every customer whole, I'm doing this because I always keep my promises, even if I'm a bit slow about it.