Risk register · entry
Q-F · FraudCelsius Network
A 'safe yield' deposit product was a disguised, leveraged risk book.
The fifth quadrant, where the thing was never real. The tell is that the story is too clean.
Why this room
The advertised payoff was simple and bank-like, a fixed weekly yield on a plain deposit, but the actual book was a leveraged, undisclosed commodity pool wired into DeFi and token-price manipulation, so once Terra's collapse hit, the risk behaved as fat-tailed and correlated rather than the mild, contained randomness customers had been sold.
The record
- 4.7 billion dollars in customer deposits inaccessible after the June 2022 freeze / owed to customers as unsecured creditorscertain
- 1.2 billion dollar deficit disclosed at Chapter 11 filing, 13 July 2022certain
- Approximately 20 billion dollars in lifetime customer deposits pooled into the unregistered 'Celsius Pool' per CFTC complaintlikely
- Peak assets under management approximately 12 billion dollars, May 2022likely
- CEL token ICO raised 50 million dollars, March 2018certain
- Approximately 350 million dollars spent on CEL buybacks since July 2019, including weeks of roughly 8 million dollarslikely
- At least 500 million dollars parked in Terra's Anchor Protocol before the UST collapseuncertain
- Terra/UST collapse wiped out roughly 40 billion dollars in about 72 hours, May 2022likely
- CEL token price fell from roughly 7 dollars to about 0.21 dollars around the freezelikely
- Withdrawal freeze 12 June 2022; Chapter 11 filing 13 July 2022certain
- Mashinsky sentenced 8 May 2025 to 12 years in prison, 3 years supervised release, 50,000 dollar fine, forfeiture of 48,393,446 dollarscertain
- Mashinsky's personal CEL sale proceeds reported at approximately 42-48 million dollars across different filingsuncertain
- FTC settlement of 4.7 billion dollars, among the agency's largest evercertain
- Bankruptcy exit 31 January 2024 with just over 3 billion dollars distributed to creditors, plus equity in new company Ionic Digitallikely
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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