- Back to menuPrices
- Back to menuResearch
- Back to menu
- Back to menu
- Back to menu
- Back to menuResearch
Crypto Lender Celsius' Bankruptcy Judge Orders It to Return $50M of Crypto to Custody Account Holders: Bloomberg
Celsius filed a motion in September to return crypto to customers who held assets in such accounts.

A U.S. bankruptcy judge involved in the Celsius Networks bankruptcy case ordered the crypto lender to return crypto worth $50 million to users of custody accounts, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
Celsius, about a month after its bankruptcy filing in July as reported by CoinDesk, in September filed to return custody holders' funds to them, ahead of a separate hearing to address ongoing questions about its efforts to restructure and relaunch its operations.
According to the filing, Celsius has about 58,300 users who collectively deposited over $210 million with its custody and withhold, with 15,680 customers holding "Pure Custody Assets" worth around $44 million. The Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, which is overseeing the case, scheduled a hearing for Oct. 6 to discuss the matter.
The order was delivered verbally in a hearing Wednesday, and applies to applies to an amount of crypto that was worth about $44 million in September. Celsius owes billions of dollars of coins to other users.
Celsius' argument was that unlike Celsius customers using its Earn or Borrow products, customers with custodial accounts still maintain ownership of their crypto assets. Celsius was merely acting as the storage provider. Therefore, these funds belong to the customers, not to Celsius' estate.
Read more: Looking at the Claims Celsius Operated Like a Ponzi
Greg Ahlstrand
Originally from California, I've been Asia-based since 1999, headquartered in Hong Kong and Jakarta and traveling throughout the Asean countries, Japan, Korea, the Chinese mainland and Taiwan for stories. Made Australia a couple of times, too. I started my journalism career as a news assistant at the Fresno Bee in Central California while studying the subject in school after the Navy. I went from launching and recovering helicopters on flight decks at sea to recovering papers fresh off the printer in the Bee's basement and launching them onto the editors' desks, whose editors had long since gone home for the night. Eventually, they let me stop delivering the paper and start writing stuff in it. My first beat was night cops: liquor store robberies, gang shootings, fatal car crashes (almost always alcohol related). It was an education. I am, as implied above, a U.S. Navy veteran. I served in seagoing helicopter squadrons as an aviation anti-submarine warfare technician throughout the Asia Pacific region and the Indian Ocean. I have a significant number of sailor stories to tell. I have no significant crypto holdings. Among my hobbies are welding, building stuff, home remodelling, (or knocking a house down and starting from scratch if it's too far gone to fix), riding horses and rebuilding old tractors. So far I've done a Ford 8N and a Ford 9N. It's slow going, because I live in Hong Kong and the tractors are in California, so I only get to work on them once or twice a year, for a week or two at a time - and that was before covid. I love my Lab, Cooper, whom my neighbors asked me to adopt two years ago when they moved back to Shanghai from Hong Kong. Cooper and I actually planned the whole thing -- we've known each other almost his whole life -- but his first parents are unaware of the conspiracy; and they send him Christmas presents every year.
