Express

Celsius Pausing All Withdrawals, Swap and Transfers Between Accounts

Tyler Irvin

Summary: Crypto lending service, Celsius, announced late Sunday it would pause withdrawals, Swaps and transfers to stabilize their liquidity during “extreme market conditions,” according to a blog post. They also took to Twitter to publicize the news, but neither the blog post nor the tweet mentioned a time period for the pause. In order to accomplish ...

Crypto lending service, Celsius, announced late Sunday it would pause withdrawals, Swaps and transfers to stabilize their liquidity during “extreme market conditions,” according to a blog post. They also took to Twitter to publicize the news, but neither the blog post nor the tweet mentioned a time period for the pause.

In order to accomplish this, Celsius activated a clause in their Terms and Use, in order to put themselves in a “better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations.” This confirms speculations over the last few weeks questioning whether or not Celsius can pay the high returns it guarantees users.

“We are taking this necessary action for the benefit of our entire community in order to stabilize liquidity and operations while we take steps to preserve and protect assets,” the blog post said.
“Furthermore, customers will continue to accrue rewards during the pause in line with our commitment to our customers.”

As a result, the network's native cryptocurrency, CEL, fell over 50%, currently sitting at $0.2165. While this decrease is surely based off of the network’s announcement, it does fall in line with the current crypto market which has seen Bitcoin drop $23,000 and Ethereum down to roughly $1,200.

Twitter account, Otteroooo, tweeted on June 8 that “Celsius Network is facing a liquidity crisis (95% confidence interval given public info),” and outlined what exactly that means for Celsius and its depositors.

It is clear that this account and other people speculating that Celsius might have a problem in the near future were on to something.

Crypto reporter, Colin Wu, who goes by WuBlockchain on Twitter, tweeted Sunday that Celsius has transferred about 104,000 ETH to FTX in the past three days.