When the bankruptcy required active participation to recover funds—including

Bittrex's bankruptcy revealed a documentation problem specific to long-inactive accounts: the exchange had millions of customers who had opened accounts years earlier, become inactive, and lost track of their credentials. When the bankruptcy required active participation to recover funds—including re-establishing identity via KYC with current documents—many former customers could not satisfy the verification requirements or no longer had access to the email addresses associated with their old accounts. For them, the bankruptcy process effectively rendered small balances unrecoverable.