Alexandru Kalen v World Exchange Services Pte. Ltd.

Facts

This was an assessment of damages in a representative claim, Originating Claim No 609 of 2023 (Assessment of Damages No 5 of 2025), brought by Alexandru Kalen, a Romanian citizen, for 85 individuals against World Exchange Services Pte Ltd, a Singapore company. The claimants said the defendant ran an online trading platform for digital tokens known as WEX, on which each of them held an account under a user agreement. They also relied on a buyback agreement, made through statements published in 2017, under which the defendant was to redeem WEX tokens it had issued to users.

According to the claimants, from 12 July 2018 they could not control, transfer or withdraw their tokens and money; the platform's administrators described this as a technical issue. By around November 2018 the main web address no longer worked, and by around December 2018 the platform was entirely inaccessible. The claimants sued on 13 September 2023. On a summary judgment application, an assistant registrar entered interlocutory judgment against the defendant for breach of both agreements but left damages to be assessed, and that decision was upheld on appeal. The defendant's attempts to raise links between WEX and BTC-e, a platform shut down by US authorities, and a Russian victim compensation fund were held irrelevant at this stage because liability had already been decided.

Issues

1. Whether the claimants proved the quantity of tokens and money held in their accounts as of 12 July 2018.
2. Whether the losses should be valued at the date of breach, at the date of trial, or at some other date.
3. Whether the claimants' valuation of the tokens and money on the relevant dates was reliable.

Holding

The court allowed the claim in part, assessing damages at US$10,126,158.43 rather than the present-day value the claimants sought, and ordered the defendant to pay that sum with interest at a rate to be decided after further submissions. The defendant was ordered to pay the claimants' costs on the standard basis, to be taxed unless agreed.

Reasoning

On quantity, screenshots of the accounts and statements that they were unaltered were enough to shift the evidential burden to the defendant. Its expert accepted it was impossible to establish whether the screenshots had been edited, so his evidence could not positively rebut them, and his three methods of sorting the screenshots were incomplete or speculative. The quantities in the screenshots were accepted.

On the valuation date, the court treated the question as closely tied to mitigation, drawing on the Court of Appeal's decisions in iVenture [2022] 1 SLR 302 and POP Holdings Pte Ltd v Teo Ban Lim and others [2025] SGCA 51. Losses should be valued when the claimant could reasonably be expected to mitigate, and the court preferred this to the US rule of taking the highest value within a reasonable time, which it said risked a windfall. The claimants could reasonably have thought the July 2018 problem temporary, but after the address change and rumours of closure they could have demanded their assets, sued, or bought some substitute tokens. Their waiting nearly five years and the defendant's continuing breach did not justify valuing the loss at trial. The court therefore fixed a date around October or November 2018 and did not need to consider later events such as the Covid-19 pandemic.

On value, the claimants' prices from two data aggregators were credible, and the defendant's expert agreed one of them was reliable; his differing figures appeared to use opening rather than closing prices. As the claimants did not give values for October and November 2018, the court averaged three figures: the value on 12 July 2018, the highest value within three months after it, and the value on 1 December 2018.

From the judgment