Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg Ihad podcast, and
I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for Bloomberg News.
It's Tuesday, February twenty eight. Before it filed for bankruptcy
(00:27):
last summer, crypto lenders Celsius had a devoted following among
retail investors. These investors believed in the repeated affirmations from
Celsius's charismatic CEO, Alex Mushinsky. Mushinski would say that these
investors were making smart, low risk financial decisions by trusting
their digital tokens to the company, But the reality of
(00:50):
what was happening behind the scenes, according to a recent
report from an independence examiner, sounds like it was very different.
According to the allegations and report, the risk controls at
Celsius were much less thorough and much less sophisticated than
what they were telling their customers at the time. That
report clocks in at six hundred and eighty nine pages,
(01:13):
so there's a lot in there, But fundamentally, it alleges
that Celsius misrepresented the true financial health of the company
in ways that turned out to have devastating consequences for
those customers who trusted them. Bloomberg's Olga Kreife has read
many hundreds of those pages, and she joins me now
with the details. Olga, welcome back to the show. Thank
(01:42):
you for having me today. We are not going to
talk about that's a big change, that's huge. I know
it's a surprise, But we are going to talk about
a company that I think, in a lot of ways
is equally important to understanding what's been happening in crypto,
and that company is Celsius. I and again reminding all
(02:05):
others nerves, this is a theoretical example. I do not
personally own a bunch of crypto. I do not own
any crypto. But if I did own a bunch of crypto,
I could have gone to Celsius, would say ten thousand
dollars worth of bitcoin, for example, and then said, okay, Celsius,
I'm gonna let you take this money and lend it
(02:28):
out to other people, and you will pay me some
kind of really high interest rate in return. Is that correct?
That's exactly right. And you know, for years Alexandmaschinsky, CEO
of Celsius, he basically said that, you know, if you
put your money in a bank. You're basically going to
get this tiny little interest if any. But you know,
(02:52):
it's a smart financial move for you to come to
Celsius and actually earn and much higher yield with you know,
he said low risk. If I wanted to borrow money
from Celsius, what would I do? So you would come
to Celsius, And it depended on who you were. Basically,
(03:13):
sometimes people had to put up collateral to borrow from Celsius,
but sometimes, as we found out more recently, they didn't
have to put up collateral, or not as much collateral.
As you know, some customers who kept their funds on
Celsius thought they needed to put up And so that
(03:35):
brings us to this Examiner report that came out in
January that sort of uncovered that there were a lot
of discrepancies in between institutional for instance, and retail borers
at Celsius. So when we talk about collateral, because I
think this is a really important point and you know,
(03:57):
it gets to the heart of as you say, this
report that was published just recently, when you talk about
collateral in a traditional loan context, that's like, if I
want to borrow money to buy a house, I have
to pledge some kind of asset in return. That might
be a down payment, that might be some other asset
(04:18):
that I have. But if I were very wealthy and
I owned, say, you know, millions and millions of dollars
worth of shares, I could pledge those shares as collateral
if I wanted to borrow money to do something else
like build a spaceship or whatever it is that really
wealthy people do with their billions of dollars. But the
idea is that in the case that I didn't pay
my loan back, the bank or the person who let
(04:41):
me money would have a way to at least cover
the losses. Is that roughly how that works. Absolutely, and
it worked very differently on Celsius. Let me give you
one example. So, for instance, FTX, they change that when
bankrupt last November, would borrow coins from Celsius and it
would put up its own FTT token, which FTX is
(05:05):
should as collateral. Now we know because FTX collapsed in
November that you know, the value FTT tokens was very questionable,
and actually people inside of Celsius knew that as well,
that it was questionable and probably you know, should not
be accepted as collateral, but it was still accepted as collateral.
(05:27):
So those are the type of transactions that Celsius had facilitated.
When I was reading the Examiner report, like one of
the things that really jumped out to me was this
idea that this wasn't something that happened recently. It's not
that these standards only eroded in twenty twenty one or
twenty twenty two before they filed for bankruptcy. It sounded
(05:48):
like there had been a real pattern of having less
than robust risk management for a much longer time. Absolutely
so machine Ski and his co founder they came up
with the idea for Celsius in twenty seventeen, and this
company was the service was launched in twenty eighteen. And
(06:09):
actually some risk control policies well they were not even imposed,
they were just there was I think more of a
pretense of imposing risk controls. But that only started in
twenty twenty one, according to the Examiner report. And so
one thing that they examined a highlighted throughout this, you know,
(06:33):
almost seven hundred page report, is that this company they
had trouble with accounting, they had trouble with pain taxes,
they had trouble with risk controls. I mean they used
quick books and Google spreadsheets to keep track of the
coins that were you know, lent and borrowed. And obviously
(06:54):
quick books is for small to mid sized businesses, and
you know, right, everyone's apparently exactly and the examiner couldn't
even find a lot of the older record keeping. It
does not exist, apparently. And the risk controlled policies, you know,
(07:15):
when when internal people were suggesting some of this risk
control measures which are pretty standard that were not implemented.
A lot of them were sort of not implemented even
after the suggestions have been made and issues have been raised.
You know, Alex Maschinski, according to the examiner's report, was
(07:37):
very focused on pretty much just growing the user base
of Celsius and not on anything. Well, how does that
contrast with what Maschinsky was telling customers at the time.
So at the time and actually, you know, up until
(07:59):
self is froze withdrawals on June twelfth of last year,
essentially machine Ski was telling everybody we have enough funds,
we have all the funds we need to reimburse everybody.
You know, everything is fine. And for actually several months
(08:20):
before then, things actually for many months before then, things
were not fine. Celsius was recording massive losses. It was
spending customer and investor money to prop up its own
cell token. And when things went south last May, when
(08:41):
the Terra blockchain collapsed, this was sort of just the
last nail in the coffin. But Celsius filed for bankruptcy
with a hole in its balance sheet of more than
a billion dollars. But you know, a lot of this
whole actually happened way earlier than May. Everything that could
have gone wrong with this business pretty much. Did you know,
(09:02):
they borrowed money from a lender and then the lender
refused to give them their collateral back, for example, or
they entrusted their you know, thousands of ether too, somebody
who lost access to that ether. You know, all kinds
(09:23):
of strange things happened in this business. And I think
partially this goes back to what you said, you know,
the lack of risk controls and the business wasn't managed well.
Now you've been a reporter for a long time, I
feel like you've heard people say this before. But yeah,
this time, for sure, we're going to pay attention to
(09:44):
the fundamentals. We're not going to just try to chase
after the thing that everybody's chasing at. We're not going
to overpay for deals. We're going to be really thoughtful
and deliberate and really care about risk. And then like
three years later everything blows up again. Oh absolutely. I
mean we saw this with initial coin offerings, where vcs
were front and center in a lot of them, you know,
(10:07):
and made a lot of money on icos before that
whole space sort of collapsed because of enforcement and regulation,
and actually many vcs ended up just escaping with the
money they made, and a lot of the retail users
ended up losing all of their money and getting hurt.
(10:28):
And I think that's what happened last year again with
the collapse of a lot of this crypto lenders, where
you know, just regular a lot of regular people last
everything they had. So I totally agree with you that
I think is just memories are short up. Next, more
(10:48):
from Bloomberg reported Ubercarif on why Celsius mathos in the
crypto ecosystem. We'll be right back. I want to go
back to something else. This idea of Celsius new Or
(11:09):
believed that they owned customer tokens even while they were
seeing the customers. No, no, no, these are always going
to be your assets. Why has this become important in
the bankruptcy fight? During sort of YouTube videos and all
kinds of weekly you know, talks that Machine Ski did
(11:33):
with users, he very frequently said that the sayo tokens,
you know, we don't own them. You or the users
own them. But many users, turns out, hadn't read Celsius's
terms of service, at least in the state that they
were in in the last couple of years. And by
(11:54):
the way, the terms of service, there were so many
versions of those it actually was part of the big
part of the proceedings initially, you know, just trying to
find all these different versions of terms of service. But
in the terms of service it specifically stated that the
users tokens if they sit in certain of the more
(12:19):
popular Celsius accounts called Urn. In the scenario, Celsius basically
owns the tokens. And when Celsius when bankrupt, what that
meant is that all of the users whose funds were
in the earn accounts, they became unsecured creditors. And obviously,
(12:40):
and the judge actually ruled that the tokens do belong
to selsius the company versus the users, and so that
essentially dramatically reduced the amount of recovery available to those users,
right because unsecured creditors, which is, you know, just like
(13:01):
a jargon for your very low down in the repayment order, Like,
if there's enough assets after we've paid everybody else in
this long list above, you great, But otherwise you're probably
not going to get very much, if you get anything
at all. Now, most people do not read terms of service,
(13:25):
very true. You sign up for something, you open a
bank account, you've download a random app onto your phone
from an app store, and there's like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I've totally read the terms of service. Tick this box,
move on, happily. Most people do not read the terms
of service. Do you think people are going to start
paying more attention to these kinds of things because of
these collapses, because of how many folks have lost money
(13:45):
as a result of them. You know, after reading the
Examiner street Port, I might be more inclined to read
terms of service, but you know, realistically, we are so
busy with our lives, right with everything we do. I mean,
who has the time to read you know, the tens
or hundreds of pages in there. And plus they're not lawyers.
(14:07):
We you know, not everybody can understand the legalist that's
in the terms of service. And I think it's a
real problem because you know, I imagine that if a
CEO of a company during a YouTube video tells you
that this is how things are, you know, most people
(14:28):
will will trust what this person will say and sign
up for the service, imagining that this is what they're
going to get in the end. But that's certainly not
the case, as Celsius showed us. And this is exactly
why various regulators around the world are starting to emphasize
this idea of should there be better consumer protections for
(14:51):
people who are investing in crypto because the assumption that
companies are doing appropriate risk management, or even that customers
are doing appropriate personal risk management is turning out not
to be founded on reality in some of these cases. Absolutely.
(15:12):
I mean, over the last year, so many companies went
bankrupt and so many hundreds of thousands of users lost
money here in the US because of this. I think
this left basically a lot of the regulators here with
you know, essentially a black eye. You know, where were
(15:35):
they when all of this stuff was happening now. I
started this episode by saying that we're not going to
talk about FTX, and people will be like, oh, why
fts is so interesting? What should people understand about these
other companies in the crypto ecosystem, companies like Celsius and
why they are and continue to be important in order
(15:56):
to really get a sense of how this overall mark
please operates. You know, like any other markets, crypto I
think thrives on on essentially leverage. You know, a lot
of people enter this market via leverage, where they would
you know, put some money down on a crypto exchange
(16:19):
and make bets with you know, a much much larger
amount of money. If they lose their bed, they're sort
of collateral, if you will, will evaporate. So a lot
of people have been doing this encrypto for a while,
for a number of years, and what the scrypto lenders
allowed people to do is to even do more complex
(16:44):
sort of borrowing and blending strategies and allowed more people
to access to leverage. And you know, while I would
say most most of the scrypto lenders win bankrupt last ye,
not all of them. The fact of the matter remains
that I think people will find out a way to
(17:08):
gain leverage in this market as they have another as well,
and you know, I think it's just behooves regulators to
stay on top of this. Well. On that cheery note,
thank you very much, Olger. It's always a pleasure to
have you on the show. It was my pleasure. I
so appreciate you hapving me on. That was Bloomberg reporto Ogokarf.
(17:29):
You can find more of her reporting on the Bloomberg
terminal and on Bloomberg dot com. And if you're interested
in all things bankruptcy, because come on, we talk about
it a lot on the show, you should check out
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It's as exciting as it sounds. You can find it
on Bloomberg dot com. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily
(17:53):
podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio,
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for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net. The
supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky Vergelina. Our senior
(18:14):
producer is Janet Babin. Our producers are Mohammed Farouk and
Sharon Barrero. Our associate producers are Ty Butler and Moses
on Them. Desta wonder At is our engineer. Original music
by Leo Sidron. I'm Stacy Mariaschmaal. We'll be back tomorrow.