Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are a high-risk venture. Now, a large company has declared insolvency. This involves billions of euros managed by this firm.
Cryptocurrencies are currently in crisis. The values of Bitcoin and others are falling sharply, and many users are now selling their mining equipment: Former crypto miners are flooding the market with cheap graphics card offers and selling graphics cards below the suggested retail price.
Now the crisis has also hit a large company, which is supposed to officially manage cryptocurrencies worth billions of US dollars. Many users are now worried about their wealth.
A company is missing a billion euros, users can no longer access their wealth
What kind of company is this? Celsius Network was a type of lending company: You could take out a loan and use cryptocurrencies as collateral.
However, Celsius is not a bank in the traditional sense. Instead, the company from New Jersey operated as a so-called Money Services Business (MSB): Celsius is a financial service provider without government oversight and acts more like a currency exchange.
Additionally, users could deposit various digital currencies into their wallets and then receive percentage returns.
Many trusted this company and utilized the opportunities. This is at least reflected in the assets that Celsius Network managed. In May 2022, the firm managed more than 12 billion USD.
What happened now? The company had to file for bankruptcy in July 2022. Because the crypto trading and lending company shows liabilities of 5.5 billion USD in its documents but has assets of only 4.31 billion USD.
Over a billion euros are missing. This announcement plunges many users who trusted Celsius Network into great despair. Because many users had likely invested money here.
Several weeks earlier, Celsius Network had blocked user accounts so that no one could withdraw their money. Currently, no one can access their wealth that is located on the servers and accounts.
“My savings are gone, and I managed to ruin my life.”
These are the reactions to the bankruptcy: Both on the official subreddit of Celsius Network and in other threads, users are discussing the company’s insolvency.
Many individuals are horrified and shocked, as no one is sure what will happen to their money now. One user writes on reddit: “My savings are gone, and I managed to ruin my life.”
Some people are also upset about the company’s lack of transparency. The company still sends emails about bonus payments every week. Others complain that they only found out about the bankruptcy by chance (via reddit.com):
I can’t believe I found out about the bankruptcy from a damn Reddit thread and not from the company….
Others have already lost a lot of cryptocurrencies. A game had relied on so-called NFTs to give people an incentive. The game had some similarities with the Pokémon franchise: The focus was on trading and breeding creatures. But now hackers have stolen cryptocurrencies worth 550 million euros:
Hackers steal €550 million from NFT game – Pokémon-like game was unfortunately too successful
