Bitfinex’s decentralized ERC20 token spin-off, Ethfinex has announced a “management buyout” that will see it re-brand and split from the troubled exchange.

With its legal battle to avoid handing over information to the New York Attorney General’s office as part of an $850 million investigation over alleged fraud locked an ongoing rally of legal letters, the cryptocurrency exchange is now seeing another development on the horizon.

Ethfinex will apparently move forward under the management of CEO Will Harbourne and seven other former Bitfinex and Ethfinex staffers, re-branding under the new name DeversiFi. The split will also see the new company wash its hands of involvement with Tokenix, the Initial Exchange Offerings (IEO) platform its team helped set up and run for Bitfinex.

Harbourne told The Block that he “wouldn’t call it a coup d’état” and that the split was happening “with Bitfinex’s blessing.”  The new platform will now register its business in the British Virgin Islands, taking with it all revenue earned from fees, and with an eye to gaining regulatory approval in Europe where the majority of its users are apparently based.

Also on the horizon, according to Harbourne is a platform software update that will bring with it decentralized margin trading through the use of decentralized leverage tokens, and an updated fee structure it claims will “give it a competitive edge”. An updated mobile-optimized version of DeversiFi is also under development, we’re told.

Also due for overhaul as part of the switch are the Nectar (NEC) governance tokens currently utilized by Ethfinex. 2.0 versions of will, DeversiFi says, offer “new incentives to holders of NEC and users”. These new tokens will also for the basis of necDAO, a platform that will propose and decide upon all new NEC features in the future.  

As its former partner’s problems in the US appear to be growing and deepening, it is likely that DeversiFi will be happy to be rid of the particularly large shadow cast over Ethfinex by the larger centralized exchange. However, as Will Harbourne happily admitted during the May launch of Tokenix, that infamy bought with it a certain amount of traffic and exposure, which will be hard to replicate as a solo operation.

Nevertheless, a statement on the site’s blog now says it’s “time to shut down Ethfinex.com”, though no timescale for that move has been formally announced as yet. Ethfinex.com still appeared operational at the time of writing.