Filing: bankrupt crypto lender Celsius wants to raise $14.4M by selling coupons, which expire six months after purchase, and credits for Bitcoin miner Bitmain
Andrew Asmakov / Decrypt :
Context & Ripple Effects
After freezing withdrawals in mid-2022, Celsius entered bankruptcy and has been scraping together operating cash from wherever it can: first an expectation of roughly $70M in repayments on its USD-denominated loans to fund operations through late 2022, while sources reported Goldman Sachs raising $2B from investors to buy its distressed assets. The new filing shows how thin that pipeline has gotten — the estate is now monetizing vendor paper itself.
The $14.4M target comes from selling coupons that expire six months after purchase plus credits for Bitcoin miner Bitmain, assets Celsius holds rather than cash it earns. Days after this filing, the estate proposed a sale to investment firm NovaWulf with smaller creditors regaining ~70% of funds, so this raise reads as bridge liquidity for an estate steering toward a resolution.
First-order effects
- Celsius gains up to $14.4M in near-term liquidity from assets it could not otherwise use — the coupons expire within six months, so the estate is trading future value for cash it needs now during the bankruptcy process.
Second-order effects
- Buyers of the coupons and Bitmain credits become the latest entrants in Celsius' distressed-asset market alongside suitors like Goldman Sachs' investor group, pricing Celsius' vendor relationships at a deep discount.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, insolvent crypto lenders will be stripped not just of loans and coins but of every tradeable instrument they hold — vendor credits, prepaid capacity — turning bankruptcy estates into liquidators of an entirely new class of crypto-adjacent paper before any restart or sale plan (like the NovaWulf proposal) can be executed.
The trend: Bankrupt crypto lenders are monetizing ever-thinner slices of their balance sheets — from loan repayments to expiring vendor coupons — as estates stretch operating cash toward creditor recoveries.