Suppose bitcoin’s (BTC) price doubles over the coming months. Would the hundreds of thousands of customers whose cryptocurrency assets are frozen within stricken lending platform Celsius Network come out ahead, or just break even?
This is uncharted territory for a U.S. bankruptcy court.
The high volatility of cryptocurrencies created the extreme market conditions that saw crypto lender Celsius freeze customer withdrawals in early June and later confess to a $1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet. But an equally dramatic upswing in cryptocurrency prices could conceivably happen before the case – in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York – is concluded.
The possibility of a thaw in the crypto winter was mentioned at the first bankruptcy hearing by Patrick Nash – a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, the law firm representing Celsius – who added that the majority of customers are expected to remain “long crypto.”
The strategy of waiting for an eventual change in the crypto climate was echoed by Vincent Indelicato, a partner at law firm Proskauer who is focused on corporate restructurings.
“Stakeholders may very well want to use the bankruptcy process to wait out the crypto winter and hibernate until it thaws a little bit so that they could then capture the upside of the rebound,” Indelicato said in an interview with CoinDesk.