Celsius withdrew $320m on the shutdown eve
Due to the "extreme market conditions", Celsius, known as one of the biggest players in the cryptocurrency credit market, suspended its operations on June 13, 2022.
However, during 3 days (from June 11 to June 13), the company withdrew almost $320 million worth of assets via the FTX exchange.
TokeScope Team decided to check this information and to look into the situation. It is known that Celsius, according to the website of the company, raised $750 million of funds from the investors in 2021, including Canada's second-largest pension fund, the Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec. That time, Celsius was estimated at $3.25 billion.
Last October, Alex Maszynski, the company's CEO, said Celsius had more than $25 billion in assets.
As of May 17, 2022, Celsius had $11.8 billion in assets and $8.2 billion in loans, according to the company's website. Thus, the financial situation of the Celsius has fallen by half in six months.
To confirm the information about the withdrawal before the suspension, we examined Celsius Network Wallet addresses: 0x8aceab8167c80cb8b3de7fa6228b889bb1130ee8 and 0x4f6742badb049791cd9a37ea913f2bac38d01279.
The transaction analysis showed that in total Celsius service withdrew more than 150 000 ETH and 12 500 WBTC for converting into other coins during the last 4 days.
While such activity in general does not confirm the stability and transparency of the Celsius, until the company explains such movements, a possible solution to ensure the stability of the service would be to replace volatile currencies such as WBTC and ETH that were previously withdrawn from Aave with stablecoins.
The impact of the suspension of the Celsius put additional pressure on the entire cryptocurrency market, which, has been showing negative dynamics for the recent times.
The story with the suspension of the Celsius service and withdrawal of large amounts of money reminds us of the recent LUNA coin story, on which we conducted separate investigations Who is behind the collapse of LUNA; The hidden funds of the LUNA project.
Like the Terra Luna, the Celsius token was a part of network that included several classic financial functions, such as lending cryptocurrency assets and receiving interest on them.
It should be noted that with the suspension of the Celsius service, its CEL coin fell almost 50%.
TokenScope Team continues to monitor the situation.
