Celsius creditors contemplate next steps following examiner report

Quick Take

  • The Celsius Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, which represents the interest of creditors, hosted a town hall on Twitter Tuesday.
  • The committee spoke about the firm’s proposed recovery corporation concept but said it was also exploring other options. 
  • Listeners also asked about findings in the examiner’s report released on Tuesday. 

Despite a damning report from a court-appointed examiner, lawyers representing former Celsius customers told clients they are still in talks with the company around a "recovery corporation" proposal put forward by Celsius's lawyers in a last-ditch effort to partially repay them.  

The Twitter space town hall for the Celsius Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors came despite findings describing extreme self-dealing and over-leveraging in the report released earlier Tuesday. 

During a Twitter space “town hall,” which had about 2,500 listeners on Tuesday, representatives from the committee spoke about a recovery corporation concept — a proposal for the company to tokenize and distribute to account holders an “asset share token that would reflect the value of the assets managed by the Recovery Corporation." 

A UCC attorney said that the committee is also, "running down a number of other options in particular,” and expressed dismay that details of bids for Celsius leaked last week. 

Another of the options the UCC is exploring is selling off Celsius's mining business, a committee representative said. The lawyer also said the committee has been looking at “winding down Celsius or transferring the crypto to a third party.” 

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A court-appointed examiner released an over 600-page report earlier on Tuesday that contained major revelations, from blowing past its own lending limits, including lending $2 billion to Tether, to owing millions in taxes. Celsius remains in the middle of the bankruptcy process after a sudden collapse last summer. 

Listeners also asked about CEL, the lender’s native token, which was mentioned throughout the examiner’s report. The examiner found that Celsius spent at least $558 million buying CEL. 

It is in the best interest for people to distance themselves from the CEL token, a listener using the Twitter name "Victim of Celsius" said during the audio town hall. 

“So much controversy and so much drama. I feel like it’s really taking away from the process and I hope that the UCC agrees with that,” they said. 

The examiner’s report with respect to the CEL token speaks for itself, a UCC representative acknowledged.  

“There was a lot of manipulation of the token and it was used in extremely improper ways by insiders and that part is not lost on us,” said the rep.  


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About Author

Sarah is a reporter at The Block covering policy, regulation and legal happenings. Before, Sarah was a reporter with CQ Legal writing about securities regulation, which is where she first started reporting on crypto. Sarah has also written for The Bond Buyer and American Banker, among other finance-related publications. She graduated from the University of Missouri and earned a degree in print and digital journalism. Sarah is based in Washington D.C., and is an avid coffee lover. You can follow her on Twitter @ForTheWynn.

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