Celsius Hands Out $2.5 Billion to 251,000 Creditors

According to a Monday court filing, the Celsius bankrupt cryptocurrency lender has reimbursed almost $2.53 billion to 251,000 creditors.

As per the Celsius bankruptcy administrator, over 121,000 creditors have yet to make any claims about their funds.

Celsius has reimbursed two-thirds of its qualified consumers as part of its much-awaited bankruptcy proceedings.

This sum amounts to almost 84% of the $3 billion in assets that the now-defunct crypto lender owes to more than 375,000 debtors.

The payments made in bankruptcy are a good thing for the growing cryptocurrency market. They occur concurrently with the Mt. Gox exchange’s bankruptcy filing. At the time, the exchange owed 127,000 debtors approximately $9.4 billion in cryptocurrency. These creditors are now starting to get their possessions back after ten years.

Only some creditors want to get their cryptocurrency back.

Because of the small amount owed, not all creditors aggressively seek to retrieve their cryptocurrency.

According to the filing, 41,000 creditors are due between $100 and $1,000, and 64,000 have less than $100 worth of cryptocurrency. The remaining 121,000 creditors still need to claim their funds.

“Given the small amounts at issue for many of these creditors, they may not be incentivized to take the steps needed to successfully claim a distribution.”

Every two weeks, the bankruptcy administrator will attempt to distribute the funds to these creditors again using Coinbase, and PayPal claim codes will always be usable for credits.

“More than 2.7 million distributions were attempted in total for the approximately 372,000 currently eligible creditors,” according to the administrator.

The story of Celsius’s bankruptcy: What you should know

July 2022 saw Celsius file for bankruptcy, one month after it had stopped accepting user withdrawals.

The company stated that after the price of its native token, Celsius (CEL), crashed in 2022, the break was required to put it in a “better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations.”

Celisus’s bankruptcy resulted in settlements with the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the United States Federal Trade Commission totaling $4.7 billion in fines.

Federal prosecutors detained Alex Mashinsky, the company’s former CEO, and accused him of financial fraud, pricing manipulation, and deceiving Celsius consumers. After entering a not-guilty plea, Mashinsky is free on a $40 million bond while awaiting trial in September.