Earlier this week Romanian Bitcoin exchange btcXchange.ro issued an advisory that customers withdraw both Bitcoin and Leu denominated funds from their platform by today, December 19th. Today they issued a further advisory that issues on their platform are related to an ongoing dispute between that platform's management and their developer.

The platform's developer who goes by the handle Naphex online has yet to offer a detailed account of his perspective on the dispute though several minutes before the original advisory was posted on the Bitcointalk forum he left the following feedback for the platform's business manager on the #bitcoin-otc Web of Trust:

<gribble> Rating change | Old rating 10 | New rating: Naphex > -5 > HoreaV | Can't resist trying to fuck people over.

The best evidence at hand seems to suggest that so far the nature of the dispute seems to be contractual, and posturing to try to control the narrative is likely to continue in this dispute. At present it is unclear if resolution will eventually be found in court or by in some other venue. The full text of today's announcement from btcXchange.ro is available below for posterity:

Dear customers of BTCXchange and BTCXpay,

We apologize for any inconvenience caused in recent days. Unfortunately, our main programmer took control of servers refusing to hand in resignation.

Today, December 19th, 2014, after many discussions, we have to resort to legal institutions even if this choice is not a very fast one. Therefore, to regain accesses, the BTCXchange and BTCXpay services will not be available.

Given that affected both customer funds and business activity, we asked the authorities to intervene swiftly to set up a committee of independent experts who will determine the potential abuses of our former colleague, Ivan Lucian Aron (also known as Nophinity or Nopex).

Our requests are as follows:
– Users and passwords delivery at all levels;
– Source codes delivery, property of BTCXchange Ltd.;
– Determining user accounts changes and observing prejudices.

We assure all clients that there is no risk of insolvency, but until we regain the server accesses all withdrawal activities are checked manually.
After regaining accesses, we will suspend the activity for a short period of time in order to technically evaluate servers. We estimate the revival of services at the end of January 2015.