Cheyenne Ligon
Cheyenne Ligon is a CoinDesk news reporter with a focus on crypto regulation and policy. She has no significant crypto holdings.
Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius appears to be considering a plan to turn its debt into crypto “IOU” (“I Owe You”) tokens.
Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July, a month after halting withdrawals due to a liquidity crisis it blamed on “extreme market conditions.” Subsequent bankruptcy proceedings in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) have revealed the depths of Celsius’ financial troubles: the lender owes 500,000 creditors nearly $5 billion.
Even if Celsius sold all of its assets – including its mysterious, half-finished mining subsidiary, Celsius Mining, upon which Celsius’ executives and bankruptcy lawyers have pinned their hopes on getting out of debt – it would still be left with an enormous $1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet.
Instead, a leaked audio recording of an internal Celsius meeting – shared by Celsius customerYouTuber Tiffany Fong – indicates that Celsius is considering another, alternative method for repaying customers: wrapping the Bitcoin, Ether and USDC it owes customers into a token that, as Celsius co-founder and CTO Nuke Goldstein explains, “represents the ratio between how much we really owe and how much we really have.”
Customers could then either redeem the wrapped “IOU tokens” (though a timeline for these redemptions remains unclear), trade them on the open market, or hold them to speculate on Celsius’ potential recovery in the long term.
In another leaked call shared by Fong, Celsius executives told employees at an all-hands meeting on Sept. 8 that Celsius’ CEO Alex Mashinsky had already shared the plan to issue the IOU tokens with the unsecured creditors committee (UCC), who met the proposal with “positive feedback.”
“This is really how we resolve this, how we get out,” Oren Blonstein, Celsius’ chief compliance officer, told employees at the meeting. “What we do in this pivotal moment can be through unprecedented, really innovative solutions and this [plan] is one of them.”
The plan, if accepted by the UCC, however, wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented.
Liquidity-strapped Chinese mining pool operator Poolin suspended withdrawals from its wallet service earlier this month. A week later, it announced that it would issue IOU tokens to impacted customers representing a 1:1 ratio of user balances across six cryptocurrencies.
The plan also bears some resemblance to Bitfinex’s recovery plan following a hack that drained 120,000 BTC from the exchange’s reserves in mid-2016. The exchange issued debt tokens to customers impacted by the hack, which were then traded on the open market – often for much less than their $1 face value. By April 2017, Bitfinex had bought back all of its remaining debt tokens.