Crypto Crash Drags Lender Celsius Network into Bankruptcy
wsj.com
wsj.com
However, Apple, American Airlines, Six Flags, there's been a lot of bankruptcies or near misses (Microsoft bailed Apple out in 1997) that have come back.
As far as payback goes there's historically two structures and more recently it's been a hybrid
Essentially account balances are broken up into tiers like taxes. So for instance $0-500 are paid back 100%, $500-$2,500 are paid back 90%, $2,500-$5,000 back 70% etc
It's a protective measure really. You want to piss off the fewest people and your $500,000 account holder will be pissed about only getting $200,000 or whatever but there's a huge social pressure against them to act on it because now the optics is they're a rich person stealing from the poor. So in practice it's just "grumble grumble" and you're safe from the courts
As an aside, people have been selling their Celsius accounts for a few weeks now in the same way collections people sell debt. That one is a new one. I wonder if Voyager will follow
Financial disclosure: I've got $38.00 locked up in Celsius and $10.00 in Voyager so I'm an interested but not meaningfully affected party
Microsoft who was battling a monopoly case, infused them with $150 million to stop that from happening and keep the competition in the game.
If you can't see their public statement of a clock ticking towards imminent bankruptcy as being called "imminent bankruptcy" then I'm sorry, I cannot help you any more.
In bankruptcy, though, I’m not sure why depositors would get treated any differently based on their account balances. Assuming we’re not talking about an FDIC insured institution, I would think they’d all be in the same class of general unsecured creditors.
There was a bank bail-in a few years back (Malta or Cyprus, I think) where depositors with larger balances took a bigger haircut than the mom ‘n’ pops, widows and orphans, but I think that was a function of their entire financial system melting down, not having a deposit insurance regime and being a haven for Russian oligarchs stashing their cash overseas (and thus just about the least sympathetic depositors imaginable).
There's other tactics that was used in Greece and in the US before the FDIC.
First in, first out + daily cap. In this model, the institution states they have $X of liquidity say tomorrow, you can withdraw up to $Y. You do X/Y and you get the number of customers that can withdraw the maximum amount.
My grandparents lived in Chicago at the time and said there was a time when a separate family member would be in line 24 hours a day. One for tomorrow and one for the day after that, etc. But even then they got back like $0.20 on the dollar (my last grandparent died about 30 years ago so forgive me if some details are off)
But generally speaking a good faith effort is made to honor the depositors balances. The schemes to do so varies, but it's generally not 0. These people running these institutions might be gamblers but they generally aren't sociopathic soulless con-artists - there's more lucrative things to do for those with no moral compass