Image Source: Jernej Furman, Flickr

Celsius Files for Bankruptcy

Over the past few weeks, Celsius (CEL-X) has been gradually repaying its debts to various DeFi protocols. On July 7, Celsius repaid its loan to the Maker protocol, releasing more than $400 million in collateral.

On July 13th, Celsius paid off all its DeFi debts, including over $50 million of DAI to Compound, allowing Celsius to remain a locked 10,000 wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), worth about $198 million at today’s prices. 

Paying off debts sounds like a good thing, but DeFi smart contracts don’t really give you an option. It seems the past month was mostly Celsius scrambling to unlock as much collateral as possible to pay back its debts to DeFi protocols, and much of this money was likely customer deposits. 

On July 14th, Celsius declared that it had "started voluntary Chapter 11 procedures.” Only $167 million in cash was disclosed by Celsius in the news statement, and that money will be used to "maintain operations.”

So, that leaves depositors (this writer included) in an icky situation– and what’s to be determined is what quantity of user deposits remain, and where depositors stand on the creditor tranches. In other words, by the time Celsius pays back whoever else it owes money, how much will be left for the actual depositors? 

Regardless of whether users get paid back or not, Celsius is most likely finished as a company and the reputation of all involved will be marred. 

We’re disappointed in Celsius’ lack of disclosure of what it was actually doing with user deposits. 

We’re hopeful that all Celsius users can get their money back.

We’ll continue following this story as it unravels. 

Voyager, another CeFi platform, also filed for Chapter 11. 

Burn, Baby, Burn

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced the completion of its 20th quarterly burn of BNB.

The procedure resulted in the burning of over 1.96M BNB, or around $444.6 million, according to the official blog post. The past BNB burns represented how the tokens were used and how much money was made on the Binance market.

In an effort to burn BNB tokens more quickly, Binance developed its BNB auto-burn mechanism when BEP-95 was introduced in November 2021.

The 20th burn occurs in the midst of considerable market turbulence. The sharp drops in price over the previous several months also had an adverse effect on BNB's pricing. The native token was trading above $500 at the start of the year. Since then, the price has dropped by around 60%.

Crypto Companies Are Making Phones (For Some Reason)

Solana (SOL-X) recently introduced its Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) software venture and Saga phone, and Polygon recently unveiled its own mobile play. Polygon, the Ethereum scaling platform, is collaborating with tech startup Nothing to integrate Polygon’s tech into the Nothing Phone (1), the company’s inaugural mobile smartphone. 

Why?

At least for Polygon, the idea is to integrate the Nothing Phone (1) with quick access to various Polygon-based apps and games, payments features, and Polygon’s zero-knowledge proof-based ID solution called Polygon ID. 

Will these crypto-based smartphones catch on? 

We’ll see…

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