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In July 2025, Bitpanda celebrated a strong start for its new Vision token VSN. The token, created by merging Bitpanda’s older BEST and Pantos (PAN) tokens, was listed on Kraken, KuCoin, Gate.io and MEXC and at times rose more than 40 percent on its first day. Its market cap stood at almost $700 million, around €600 million at the time.
A little over a year later, little of that is left. VSN trades at around €0.03. At the time of the swap, one VSN was worth around €0.11 to €0.12 based on the fixed exchange rates. Anyone who swapped their BEST and PAN into VSN back then has lost about three quarters of their value. The market cap has shrunk to around €118 million, meaning roughly €480 million in value has evaporated.
How BEST and PAN Became VSN
The two older tokens date back to Bitpanda’s early years. PAN was sold in 2018 in the ICO of the multichain project Pantos, raising 616 bitcoin. BEST followed in 2019 in an initial exchange offering in which around 22,000 buyers paid a total of €43.6 million for access to Bitpanda’s loyalty program. In March 2025, Bitpanda announced it would merge both tokens into the new VSN. The exchange rates were fixed based on the 30-day average up to March 25, 2025: 1 BEST became 4.91 VSN, 1 PAN became 0.89 VSN.
VSN is issued by the Vision Web3 Foundation in Zug. Of the 4.2 billion tokens, only about two thirds went to existing holders, while around 1.47 billion went to the foundation, then chaired by Fabian Reinisch, Bitpanda’s general counsel. VSN was meant to fuel an entire ecosystem, including a DeFi wallet, a launchpad and the Vision Chain, an Ethereum layer 2 for tokenized securities whose revenues are partly meant to fund VSN buybacks.
The Lawyers Step In
Now it’s about money. Vienna law firm Aigner Lehner Zuschin has sent an eleven-page demand letter to Bitpanda GmbH and Pantos GmbH on behalf of three investors so far and the Association for Potentially Harmed Crypto Investors. According to trend, more than 10,000 investors are affected, having invested several million euros in total, with a single client alone accounting for more than €2 million. “The investors trusted Bitpanda’s good reputation and bought tokens on a large scale,” says lawyer Lukas Aigner.
The most serious allegation concerns the issuance of the older tokens. PAN and BEST were offered without a capital market prospectus, even though the offerings would have required one. “The investors can demand that the purchases be reversed,” says lawyer Ivan Dimov. There is also a conflict of interest: for neither PAN nor BEST was the majority of tokens intended for investors, the firm says; it remained with Bitpanda without this ever being disclosed. Only in the whitepaper for the VSN issuance does Bitpanda acknowledge conflicts of interest. Promised features such as a mainnet for PAN or a launchpad were never delivered, and according to its own terms, BEST has conferred no rights beyond ownership of the token since the end of 2021.
The firm calls the swap itself a “forced migration.” Since July 16, 2025, PAN and BEST can no longer be traded on Bitpanda, the VIP status in the loyalty program tied to BEST was frozen, and its benefits were phased out by the end of 2025. Anyone who didn’t want to swap could only withdraw their tokens to an external wallet, without any way to trade them on the platform. “The investors therefore had no real choice,” the firm writes. It considers the unilaterally set exchange rates questionable, and investors with previously tax-free gains may also have lost that advantage through the swap. Depending on the case, the demands include withdrawal from the purchase in exchange for returning the tokens, damages and liability for the 2025 whitepaper. “You are liable to our clients for the damage arising from all their acquisitions of Pan and Best and from the exchange into VSN due to incorrect and incomplete information, undisclosed conflicts of interest and the forced exchange, including tax disadvantages,” the letter states. Even lost returns from alternative investments such as bitcoin are listed as damages.
What the Critic From Zurich Says
The groundwork was laid by a man who has been publicly scrutinizing Bitpanda for months. Zurich-based financial publicist Markus Miller examined the Vision ecosystem in six fact checks and paints a critical overall picture. VSN was delisted from spot trading on several smaller exchanges such as WOO X, SuperEx and Hotcoin, citing liquidity and market quality. The Vision Wallet’s Polymarket integration, promoted as a “killer feature,” attracted about 80 active wallets and $263,000 in trading volume after around two months. Miller had still not seen regular mainnet operation of the Vision Chain in August, even though Bitpanda presented it as launched in March. The Vision Wallet is run by a company in the Cayman Islands that is not itself permitted to provide regulated services and whose registered office is the address of an offshore service provider. And the advertised buyback mechanism initially covers only ten percent of certain net revenues of the chain, with no claim for holders.
“Trust arises where promises are backed by verifiable results,” Miller writes. He has also taken legal action: at the Munich Regional Court I, he obtained a preliminary injunction against former soccer player Oliver Kahn because Kahn’s Bitpanda post on X was not sufficiently labeled as advertising. Kahn has since accepted the injunction as final. Miller himself stresses, however, that neither his fact checks nor the Kahn case amount to a verdict on Bitpanda’s business model as a whole.
Bitpanda Stays Silent
For Bitpanda, which has always presented itself as a model student of regulation, the timing could hardly be worse. “Security and regulatory leadership remain the foundation of our success and a clear differentiator in the market,” reads the latest management report of Bitpanda GmbH, which posted a loss of €14 million last year. In August, the Austrian Financial Market Authority FMA imposed the first fine under the EU crypto regulation MiCAR on the company, €70,000 for deadline and formal errors in the VSN whitepaper. Bitpanda is now examining whether the authority was even allowed to publish the fine.
Bitpanda told trend it does not wish to comment on the law firm’s allegations “at this time,” pointing out that since its founding it has stood “for the highest regulatory standards, transparency and security.” In the company’s favor: a demand letter is not yet a lawsuit, formally no one was forced to swap, and the exchange rates were based on market prices. The decline in VSN’s price also coincides with a period in which the entire crypto market has fallen significantly. The claims are not yet time-barred: according to the firm, the deadlines run until April 2028 for PAN, August 2028 for BEST and July 2035 for VSN. If an out-of-court settlement fails, the investor association plans to go to court.
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