Kategorie: Crypto Markets

Celsius Network, a renowned crypto lending firm, has hired ‘restructuring lawyers’ amid the current crypto meltdown that has seen the largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC) lose about 40% over the past week.

Celsius has reportedly hired attorneys from a law firm called Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP to advise on the way forward as its financial woes pile up due to the falling crypto market prices.

The hiring of restructuring lawyers comes days after the crypto lender told its users that it was pausing withdrawals, swaps, and internal transfers because of extreme market volatility.

CEL price pumps and Dumps

Interestingly, CEL, the native token of Celsius Network, is among the cryptocurrencies that have remained green today. At the time of writing, the price of CEL was up by about 51% over the past 24 hours.

However, CEL had pumped to above $1.1 yesterday before dumping to its current price of $0.4819. There are still no concrete reasons as to why CEL is rising especially since this is happening as activities on Celsius Network remain paused indefinitely.

Celsius looking at options amid insolvency rumors

While Celsius is said to be looking for financial solutions from investors, it is also exploring other alternatives including a possible financial restructuring.

Currently, Celsius lends out customer deposits to other users and in return earns some interest. The company manages over $11.8 billion in crypto assets and offers percentage yields as high as 18.63% of crypto deposits.

Celsius’ move comes as lawmakers around the world start exploring what would happen if crypto platforms fail especially now that cryptocurrencies have lost a lot of value. A bipartisan duo of US senators last week proposed a bill aimed at protecting investors in an event that a cryptocurrency exchange files for bankruptcy. The bill seeks to ensure that customers’ digital assets are held in a separate account from a company’s account.

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The crypto market as a whole is mixed today. Leading cryptos continue to decline with a few exceptions.  

Top cryptos

Bitcoin lost another 7% in the last 24 hours, trading for around $22,000 at the time of writing. Ethereum, the second crypto, remained relatively flat. 

Cardano added around 10% to its value after deploying the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain on its testnet. Solana is another big winner today with gains of around 8%.  

Cryptos outside the top 10 were also mixed. Tron’s agony continues. It’s down another 6% today, rendering its weekly losses comparable to Bitcoin’s. Avalanche is reversing losses. Its token AVAX is up around 9% today. 

Top movers

The biggest winner in the top 100 is Helium. Its gains today amount to 24%. Helium House was considered one of the highlights of Consensus 2022, the leading crypto event. 

Theta Network demonstrates a strong performance with +17%. Fantom is rapidly reversing losses, adding 16% to its value today. 

Quant also added 17% to its value. Enjin Coin is up 18% and Gala 17%, reflecting a bullish trend for metaverse and gaming tokens. 

Kadena is finally reversing losses too. Despite slumping to #93 on CoinMarketCap, it’s having a strong day with +13%. IoTeX, down to #100, added 18%. On the losing side, Klaytn shed 9%, and Monero – 11%. 

Trending

The biggest winner today is METAXA, a platform on Binance Smart Chain. The Metaxa metaverse is in the works. The token will be used for purchases within it, more specifically 3D buildings. It added 187% in the last 24 h.  

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Cardano (ADA) is defying the general crypto market trend and it is up by more than 8% today. The price hike is pegged on Cardano’s deployment of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) on its testnet.

At the time of writing, ADA was trading at $0.494; up 8.37% over the past 24 hours.

IOHK, the company behind the Cardano ecosystem, announced the launch of its Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain alpha on its testnet, however, they did not specify if one day the EMV compatibility will be directly installed on its mainnet.

EVM is a decentralized computation engine that enables different smart contracts to interact with each another.

According to the IOHK tweet, the initiative will allow developers to create solidity-based applications on the Cardano network as well as enable other dApps build on Ethereum to be transferred seamlessly to Cardano.

We’re releasing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain alpha! (Now on testnet.)

Build your Solidity-based applications on #Cardano – a decentralized, permissionless, sustainable blockchain.

The future is interoperable. pic.twitter.com/sCK9XIuFll

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) June 12, 2022

The interoperable future of blockchains

Input-Output Global (IOG) senior content editor, Eric Czuleger, claimed that the community believes in “an interoperable future” where different blockchains will be able to communicate with each other.

We believe in an interoperable future built on multiple blockchains.

That’s why we’re releasing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain alpha!

We welcome the #Ethereum community of users & devs to freely engage with the best of what #Cardano has to offer. pic.twitter.com/L56ArPZ4bA

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) June 11, 2022

Besides the latest EVM sidechain deployment, Czuleger regarded this as a great opportunity to add more new users to the Cardano community without adding more complexity to the mainnet.

Quite a great number of growing layer-one blockchains have shown the importance of cross-chain communication. Apart from Cardano, main Ethereum competitors like BSC, Avalanche, and Fantom already have EVM-compatible networks.

In a blog post titled “Interoperability is key to blockchain growth” that was published weeks before Cardano launched the EVM sidechain, IGO noted that the sidechain will also allow developers to build compatible ERC-20 tokens for users to enjoy faster settlement times and lower fees.

The post also noted that Milkomeda, a sidechain protocol backing up Cardano, will allow EVM that is compatible with smart contracts to be launched on its C1 sidechain that is connected to the Cardano main chain, besides, the sidechain aim is to increase interoperability between Cardano and other blockchains like Solana before the year ends.

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Tether has announced that the USDT reserves “hold strongly” even as cryptocurrency lending provider Celsius (CEL) feels the heat of crypto volatility.

The stablecoin issuer, in a statement to this effect released on Monday, said the events wont have an impact on the stablecoin’s reserves.  

And going by events of not so long ago involving the collapse of TerraUSD (USD), Tether must have felt the need to issue a clarifying note.

“The recent events impacting the Celsius lending platform and its native token CEL are an unfortunate result of market volatility and extreme market conditions,” Tether noted. 

No correlation with USDT

According to the company, while its portfolio holds an investment in Celsius, it is but a “minimal part” of its shareholders equity. Notably, Tether said its investment in the crypto lender has no correlation to its USDT reserves.

Additionally, the lending activity between Tether and Celsius “has always been overcollateralized,” adding to the overall assertion that none of what’s happened with Celsius has an impact on the stablecoin issuer’s reserves. 

On Monday, Celsius announced a pause to all withdrawals, transfers and swaps as it tried to navigate massive volatility.

“We are taking this action today to put Celsius in a better position to honor, over time, its withdrawal obligations,” Celsius said in a message to the community.

The platform has not resumed the operations as at the time of writing. Meanwhile, the native CEL token is down 21% in the past 24 hours and nearly 96% down since its all-time high reached in January last year.

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BlockFi says its intention is to remain profitable amid the tough market conditions.

Crypto platform BlockFi has announced that it is cutting its employee numbers by 20%, following in the footsteps of other major companies in the industry.

The platform, which has seen significant growth over the past four+ years following the debut of its crypto-backed loan feature, says the job cuts will impact “every team at the company.”

According to a blog announcement from founders Zac Prince and Flori Marquez, the decision to let go of so  many of the platform’s staff is down to prevailing  macroeconomic conditions. The company says the move will be followed by a review of its strategic priorities. 

Cutting jobs to ensure company remains profitable

BlockFi’s employee count jumped from 150 at the end of 2020 to over 850 in 2022, with the massive increase coming on the back of greater growth underpinned by cryptocurrency’s incredible growth in 2021. It will now have 600+ employees.

The company, like most others in the crypto sector, experienced the pain of the ongoing bear market.

According to Zac and Flori, the staff reduction is part of wider measures undertaken over the past several months as they seek to remain profitable. The firm has reduced marketing spend, eliminated non-critical vendors and cut executive compensation. It also slowed down its hiring.

The company expects no material disruption to its services or products or services, the co-founders said in the blog post.

Other major companies to announce job cuts are crypto exchanges Coinbase and Gemini. Bitcoin and the broader crypto market has been in a downward trend since last November.

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