Bankrupt Crypto Lender Celsius Has Repaid $2.5 Billion to Creditors

Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius has now reimbursed around two-thirds of its creditors, approximately 93% of the eligible money owed. According to the recent court filing, the company has now distributed $2.53 billion to over 251,000 creditors since the repayment plan kicked off in January 2024.

Celsius, which declared bankruptcy in July 2022, allowed users to receive interest on crypto deposits. At the company’s peak, it claimed to have had 1.7 million users with $25 billion in assets under management and an $8 billion loan book. After a series of lengthy legal disputes, where users were locked out of accessing their crypto for more than a year, a plan was approved to reimburse former users in November 2023.

The plan approved by a Delaware bankruptcy court involved the creation of a new firm, called NewCo, backed by $450 million in seed funding. The restructuring team have said that NewCo will focus on Bitcoin mining and staking, according to the filing. Celsius’s debtors received cash and crypto for their losses in the recent distribution process, while some users also received common stock in NewCo, now renamed Ionic Digital.

Prices of cryptocy owed were calculated based on values as of January 16 2024. Approximately 121,000 creditors have not yet successfully claimed their proportion of the distribution, however, these are former users who are generally owed smaller amounts.  According to the recent filing, approximately 64,000 creditors had yet to claim their distribution of less than $100.

While 41,000 of these users who have not yet claimed their money, are entitled to a distribution of between $100 and $1,000. The court says these smaller creditors “may not be incentivized to take the steps needed to successfully claim a distribution.”

Despite the 93% figure, the distribution process to Celsius’s creditors has been anything but plain sailing. The filing said that the “distribution process contemplated by the Plan is likely the most complicated and ambitious distribution process ever attempted in a Chapter 11 case.”

The court said that numerous factors have complicated the distribution process, with complicating issues including “creditors not reading emails or redeeming claim codes that were sent to them for distribution at PayPal”. The court also said that some creditors had not successfully passed KYC/AML checks for opening an account with PayPal or Coinbase.

Despite recent progress, the complexity of Celsius’s legal disputes is still developing. On August 9, Celsius filed a suit claiming $2.4 billion in Bitcoin was improperly liquidated by stablecoin firm Tether before its bankruptcy in July 2022.