Filing: bankrupt crypto lender Celsius wants to raise $14.4M by selling coupons and credits it got from mining company Bitmain
Andrew Asmakov / Decrypt :
Context & Ripple Effects
Five months after its September bankruptcy filing projected ~$70M in loan repayments as operating runway, Celsius is now scraping the estate for smaller-ticket assets: it wants court approval to sell off $14.4M in coupons and miner credits it received from Bitmain, the dominant rig maker whose hardware underpins the mining operation at the heart of its recovery plan.
The sale sits inside a broader restructuring arc — days later Celsius proposed handing the business to investment firm NovaWulf with smaller creditors recovering up to 70%, and a year on the reorganized company emerged planning $3B+ distributions anchored by a new mining operation. Monetizing vendor paper is what an estate does while that larger deal is assembled.
First-order effects
- The Celsius estate converts illiquid Bitmain coupons and credits into ~$14.4M of cash available for creditor recoveries rather than holding depreciating vendor paper through the bankruptcy process.
Second-order effects
- Buyers picking up discounted Bitmain credits gain subsidized access to mining rigs, effectively routing Celsius's vendor relationship into competitors' hands and adding supply to the secondary market for miner entitlements.
- The auction gives Bitmain an implicit price signal on its own credits — distressed estates dumping them at a discount pressures the value of similar vendor commitments held by other troubled crypto-mining counterparties.
Third-order effects
- Bankruptcy estates are becoming a recurring clearinghouse for mining-hardware entitlements, meaning rig vendors like Bitmain now face resale risk on every credit extended to leveraged crypto lenders — a structural discount baked into vendor financing terms going forward.
The trend: Distressed crypto lender estates are liquidating even small vendor assets like mining-rig credits, turning bankruptcy courts into a secondary market that reprices the hardware commitments miners extend to leveraged borrowers.