Recall that the name Celsius has been making headlines on various news platforms in recent weeks. The fact is that on June 12, the platform announced “suspension of withdrawals, exchanges and transactions between accounts”. The problems with Celsius caused a noticeable panic in the market, as it almost coincided with the financial difficulties of the large cryptocurrency fund Three Arrows Capital, which we also covered separately.

Celsius platform home page

Prior to this, Celsius had experienced a liquidity crisis, that is, the inability to pay all its liabilities to its clients. The problems were caused both by a general decline in the crypto market and a serious deviation in the price of the synthetic crypto-asset stETH from the value of "real" ETH. As a result of the negative conditions, the company was forced to stop withdrawals for users as it was costing them too much. Read more about what happened in our story.

To all appearances, we can no longer expect the situation with Celsius to normalize. At the very least, the latest data proves it.

What will happen to the Celsius platform?

On 20 June, Celsius investor and co-founder of BnkToTheFuture Simon Dixon proposed a recovery plan for the project. According to him, the process should be similar to a similar procedure that the Bitfinex exchange carried out in May 2019. As a reminder, Bitfinex then issued its own token to raise funds from investors to cope with its financial difficulties. And as new tokens often attract the attention of the cryptocurrency industry, the money did manage to be raised.

Read also: The creator of Terra has come forward and tried to justify himself after the project collapsed. What did he say?

So, Celsius is already preparing for bankruptcy. The procedure involves selling off the company’s assets and reserves so that it can cover its liabilities to customers and investors. According to news outlet CryptoSlate, Celsius already has one big buyer – banking giant Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs bank logo

The bank is looking to raise at least $2 billion from various funds to take advantage of the opportunity to acquire Celsius’ assets. Note that there is no official confirmation of the news so far, and journalists have published a note referring to anonymous sources inside the bank itself. They also claim that Celsius’ management was even advised to go bankrupt by representatives of financial conglomerates Citi Group and Akin Group.

As of May 2022, Celsius had an estimated $11 billion in reserves in dollar terms. After the collapse of the crypto market, that figure is now likely to be lower, but Goldman Sachs still expects to buy the company’s assets at a very low price. By the way, the bank is not the only one willing to participate in the Celsius liquidation process. On 12 June, representatives of the platform received a similar offer from rival platform Nexo, although it is still unanswered.

Goldman Sachs buys Celsius assets

After the sale of Celsius assets to all comers, the question of compensation should come up. The platform’s investors expect to receive funds on a first-come-first-served basis, but no arrangement to this effect has been made public yet. In any case, it is not a bad sign that the management of the platform acknowledges its mistakes and is prepared to settle the matter legally. With the bankruptcy of Celsius, the crypto market will get at least one internal issue resolved.


We believe that this situation could end sadly for cryptocurrency holders, especially if the company does go through bankruptcy proceedings. Still, in such a case there is a risk for investors to be left without the full amount of their investment. So overall, this incident is a reminder that keeping all of your crypto assets on centralised platforms is definitely not a good idea - it could result in serious losses. At least some of your capital should be held on non-custodial hardware wallets.