Crypto

Transfers also 'paused' between Celsius accounts as value of digital asset market slips below $1tn.

Celsius also offers customers higher returns if they accept their interest payments in the project’s own crypto token, CEL, which was trading at $7 last year and has fallen to less than $0.20. “Due to extreme market conditions, today we are announcing that Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, swap, and transfers between accounts,” the platform said. That can be useful if, for instance, a bitcoin millionaire needs some hard cash to buy a house but does not want to liquidate their bitcoin holdings because they are gambling the coin will go up again. Celsius’s website tells customers they can “borrow like a billionaire”. It has $11.8bn in assets, down from more than $24bn in December last year. Celsius said in a blogpost it was “pausing” all withdrawals and transfers between accounts for its 1.7 million customers. Meanwhile Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, announced on Monday that it had “temporarily paused” bitcoin withdrawals owing to a “stuck on-chain transaction”.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies plunged through the weekend and into Monday as high inflation sent investors running for the exits and caused major ...

The value of crypto assets peaked at about $2.9 trillion in November 2021 before countries around the world started seeing inflation rise to its highest point in decades. Investors and market watchers had hoped the figure would ease from the 8.3 per cent level it hit the previous month, but instead it went even higher, a troubling sign that central bank efforts, such as rate hikes to rein in inflation, aren't working. "As digital assets grow in adoption, we intend to capture the right opportunities, while working with our partners toward a regulated industry." The sell-off prompted a major crypto exchange, called Celsius, to halt withdrawals on Sunday evening, meaning investors can't take what's left of their money out. "As inflation proves to be an even trickier opponent to beat than expected, Bitcoin and ethereum are continuing to get a severe bruising in the ring," said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. "Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt several sectors of the traditional economy," the Caisse said at the time.

Celsius, which offers exceedingly high interest rates, says it can't give depositors their money right now.

“Sadly it’s a regulatory failure on behalf of the SEC,” he said in a message to The Washington Post. “There were red flags on this company for years and they did nothing. “There is a lot of work ahead as we consider various options,” it said. CDPQ, one of that country’s largest pensions, is an investor in the lending platform. (The firm has offices in New Jersey, as well as Europe and the Middle East.) The New York attorney general also has requested more information on Celsius’s business. Before the halt, that rate was 18.6 percent, a multiple many times that of traditional banks and has in the past climbed as high as 30 percent. The news caused the largest cryptocurrencies to plunge — bitcoin dropped 12 percent as of late Monday morning and ethereum plunged 15 percent.