Tether Sidestepped the Contagion That Brought Down Celsius by Dumping Bitcoin Collateral

On June 12, 2022, Alex Mashinsky, founder of crypto lender Celsius, made an urgent plea for help. As the price of bitcoin crashed, panicked

Crypto lender Celsius filed for bankruptcy in June 2022 after a wave of panicked customers rushed to withdraw billions of dollars’ worth of crypto from their Celsius accounts as the price of bitcoin crashed. Now, administrators of the Celsius estate are suing Tether, a stablecoin company that extended loans to Celsius, in an attempt to claw back some of the funds that were transferred to Tether before Celsius's collapse.

The administrators allege that Tether sold off large amounts of bitcoin that was posted as security by Celsius against its outstanding loans in order to "extinguish its entire exposure" as Celsius was "tumbling towards bankruptcy." This move violated the terms of an agreement between the pair, the lawsuit claims.

The aim of the lawsuit is to claw back the 39,500 bitcoin—worth $2.3 billion at the current price—that was transferred to Tether by Celsius before its collapse. The suit cites a combination of bankruptcy laws designed to avoid a scenario in which creditors that act most swiftly to retrieve funds from an ailing business make a better recovery than others, and various other legal provisions.

In a scathing riposte posted on its site, Tether cast the lawsuit as a "shakedown" designed to deflect the blame for failures by Celsius, which gave explicit consent for the trove of bitcoin to be liquidated, it claims. “Tether will never fall prey to shameless litigation money grabs. We will defend ourselves vigorously,” the company wrote.

Legal representatives for the administrators of the Celsius bankruptcy estate did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Regardless of whether the legal arguments set out in the complaint ultimately hold, the lawsuit underlines the narrowness of the margin by which Tether sidestepped the contagion that brought down Celsius and a number of other crypto firms in 2022.

The money for loans doled out by Tether comes from the reserve of assets that pegs the company’s stablecoin, USDT, to a one-dollar valuation. If Tether had failed to liquidate the $800 million in collateral posted by Celsius before its fall into bankruptcy, accounts for June 2022 show, USDT would no longer have been fully backed by readily available assets, potentially undermining the all-important stability of the token’s price.