Turkey confirms Hex founder Richard Heart’s arrest, says police seized $7.15 million and six cold wallets

Richard Heart, legally Richard James Schueler, built HEX in 2019 as a high-yield staking token before launching the PulseChain network and its PulseX exchange, projects he promoted with conspicuous wealth and public denials of wrongdoing. The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued him in 2023 over HEX, PulseChain and PulseX, alleging unregistered securities offerings and fraud, a case that has run in parallel to his personal life abroad. That US litigation never produced an arrest; it took a Finnish tax investigation and an Istanbul operation to put him in custody, a reminder that tax authorities can move faster than securities regulators against someone who has structured his affairs across multiple jurisdictions.

Holders of HEX and PulseChain tokens now have to reckon with a founder who cannot run the project from a Turkish detention cell, and with a $7.15 million cash seizure, six cold wallets and a cache of weapons and ammunition pulled from fifteen addresses that police searched. Whoever controls those cold wallets' private keys controls funds that may be commingled between Heart's personal holdings and project-linked treasury, so token holders have no clarity on whether seized assets touch the protocols they use. Turkish prosecutors, Finnish tax authorities and the SEC each now hold a piece of Heart's legal exposure, and any of the three could move next, leaving his wife A.K., also detained in the same operation, as another unresolved thread in the case.

A founder's arrest on tax allegations, not securities fraud, cuts against the narrative that crypto's legal risk mostly comes from regulators chasing token sales; here it is an ordinary tax investigation, the kind that catches offshore wealth regardless of the asset class, that produced handcuffs. The seizure of firearms and ammunition alongside crypto cold wallets also complicates the usual framing of crypto fraud cases as purely financial, raising questions about what else was being protected at those fifteen addresses. Bitcoinist's own caution, that detention does not establish conviction, is worth repeating because Heart has spent years publicly contesting the SEC's allegations without a verdict, and Turkish authorities have not yet laid out formal charges tied to the Finnish inquiry.

The immediate marker to watch is whether Turkey moves toward extradition, to Finland over the tax investigation or potentially to the United States over the SEC's securities claims, since either path determines which legal system ultimately tries him. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek's confirmation of the arrest signals the case has political visibility in Turkey, which could speed formal charges or a bail hearing in the near term. Any court filing that details what the seized $7.15 million and six cold wallets actually belong to, personal funds, project treasury, or something else, will shape how HEX and PulseChain holders assess their own exposure to the case.