Unchained - Why the Celsius Examiner Report Shows 'a Complete Disaster in Almost Every Way' - Ep. 451

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

Following the release of Celsius' examiner report, Kadhim Shubber, an investigative reporter at The Financial Times, dives into the controversial business practices of the lender, how the company infl...ated the CEL token, the use of customers' money, and much more. Show highlights: how Celsius used investors’ money to prop up the price of CEL the reasons why Celsius inflated the CEL token where the money to pay rewards to investors came from blatant misstatements from Alex Mashinsky and how his team tried to cover him how the company leveraged Bitcoin to fill the hole in its balance sheet who was responsible for Celsius' shady business practices Celsius' poor investment decisions whether Mashinsky is at risk of facing criminal charges Thank you to our sponsors! Crypto.com Guest Kadhim: Twitter Links Final report of Shoba Pillay, examiner Financial Times: Crypto lender Celsius misused customer funds for years, examiner finds Unchained: 7 Revelations From Celsius’ Examiner Report CoinDesk: Celsius Used New Customer Funds to Pay for Withdrawals: Independent Examiner The Block: Tether denies it borrowed $2B from Celsius, as described in court report Blockchain News: Celsius' Official Creditor Committee Denies Rejected Bids Ram Ahluwalia’s take on the Celsius bankruptcy examiner report Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're no hype. The Source for All Things Crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin, author of The Cryptopians. I started covering crypto seven years ago, and as the senior editor at Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the February 3rd, 2023 episode of Unchained. If you're enjoying Unchained, please consider signing up for Unchained premium for exclusive interviews, a subscriber-only chat group, and transcripts of the shows. With the crypto.com app, you can buy, earn, and spend crypto in one place. Download and get $25 with the code, Laura, link in the description. Today's guest is Katam Schuber, investigative reporter at the Financial Times. Welcome, Katam. Thanks for having me on. This week, the Celsius Independent Examiner, Shoba Pillay, dropped her 476-page report on the failed crypto lender. and it was quite the bombshell.
Starting point is 00:01:01 What were your main takeaways from the report? The main takeaway from the report is that Celsius was a complete disaster in almost every way imaginable and almost from the very beginning in a way. One of like the major things that came out in the examiner's report is to do with the Celsius native token cell. and the way that the way that the examiner portrays what was going on with sell is that Celsius spent an enormous amount of money including its customers Bitcoin and Ethereum including investor cash simply on buying its own native token to prop up the price and and then the real kicker here is in the examiners report one of the reasons that they were spending so much money buying its own token was so that executives, including Alex Mersinski, could sell their token
Starting point is 00:02:01 and so that their sales would not crash the public price. And I think the amount is something like $68 million worth of sale that Alex Mersinski sold. Yeah, and that's referring to the CEO. That's right. Yeah, it's the CEO and former CEO and founder. You know, it's a very long document. It's almost, you know, with the appendices, I think it's like 600, 700 pages. But, it is extraordinarily damning. Yeah, something else that really struck out at me is the marketing around Celsius, and this is a lesson that customers are rather painfully learning now. Some of the claims that Celsius made about how its earned product worked or what would happen in the event of a bankruptcy were flat out false, according to this report. What were Celsius and Mishinsky
Starting point is 00:02:49 claiming and what was the reality? So the way that the examiner puts this is, is very sober in a sort of lawyer-like way. I think the line says something like, you know, the business model that Celsius marketed was not the business model that it actually operated. That's putting it mildly. So, for example, you know, Celsius represented that,
Starting point is 00:03:13 you know, that it would pay something like 80% of its revenues or profits to customers in a form of rewards. Actually, the rewards that had paid had nothing to do with how much money it was making because it wasn't making any money. They simply set rewards to beat competitors, like, say, Blockfire or Voyager, other crypto lenders.
Starting point is 00:03:35 Celsius was marketed as extremely safe. In fact, internally, its systems, its processes, its internal controls were almost non-existent. There was a particular one person internally said that it was basically a complete sham. examples, like they recognized internally that they didn't really know what was going on. In terms of the investments they were making, Celsius was represented as, you know, making institutional loans that are fully collateralized. In fact, it was doing all sorts of investments that weren't institutional loans and even the institutional loans that they was making.
Starting point is 00:04:12 A big chunk of them were completely uncollateralized or collateralized with extremely illiquid, you know, assets that were basically worth the zero as collateral. So there's a whole sort of landscape of things. Like everything that Celsius represented about itself to the public, almost every single one of them, according to the examiner's report, was not true. Yeah. And another piece of it that just kind of had my jaw dropping to the floor was that, I guess, in a lot of the video AMAs that Mishinsky did on YouTube, he would often, you know, make these different claims that did not actually represent.
Starting point is 00:04:53 how Celsius was operating. And then afterward, they would be like staff meetings on whether they should edit them, removing the information without actually alerting people that, you know, those were misstatements. And so, you know, they were very well aware that what he was claiming and what the reality were different. Let's actually now dive a little bit more into Cell as you flagged early on. What were some of the claims about Cell and what was happening behind the scenes? initially it seemed at the very start of Celsius, the cell token was just allowed to have its own price. But from about 2020, Celsius began spending its own money,
Starting point is 00:05:34 spending its customers money, spending investor money, to prop up the price. So they would tell the community, well, we buy a certain amount of sale from the market to pay the rewards that we owe you. In fact, they bought to keep the price where they wanted it to be. One, you know, I mentioned one of the reasons, the examiner said that they did this. One of the reasons was so that insiders, executives, people like Alex Mersinsky,
Starting point is 00:06:00 so that they could sell their own holdings of sale without affecting the price massively. Another reason is keeping the price of sell up had a major positive impact on Celsius's own balance sheet. So Celsius had its own holdings of cell token. It recorded it on its own balance sheet as an. asset. And therefore, by spending, you know, money that investors were giving them crypto assets that customers were giving them on buying sale, it could inflate and protect its own balance sheet. And one of the remarkable things when the examiner details the collapse in May, you know, beginning in May and then in June last year, you know, Celsius and was trying, was still trying
Starting point is 00:06:46 to prop up the price of sale because that was so much of its balance sheet. And there's a, I believe there's like a reference in, you know, maybe mid-May around the time that Tara Luna was collapsing. You know, they're still, you know, they're facing massive withdrawals and there's Trill Chan to spend money on propping the sell price up. When you read the report, you get this sense of a business kind of geared towards propping up this cell token. And it's sort of bizarre in a way. It makes, it gives you the impression that there was like, it was never. really much like a real real profitable business there yeah yeah and another piece of it was that celsius during its initial coin offering had actually claimed that it had sold all 325 million
Starting point is 00:07:35 sell in that iCO but only 203 million were actually sold and the company debated whether or not to tell the community that and ultimately didn't and then some of the other pieces just because i think the other theme that stood out to me was throughout. It was very well aware that the employees were very well aware that what was happening here was not above board. So for instance, like the head of trading said to other employees, including the then CFO, just to clarify between us three, the last three to four months, we bought more sell than what we pay as interest per week, but we did not buy it for the interest payments. That's just what we told the community. And then even the Celsius employees kind of jokingly congratulated themselves on their good work, which
Starting point is 00:08:23 resulted in people thinking that the price of cell would go to the moon, ha-ha. So they very clearly kind of understood what was happening here, and which we'll talk about in a second. They did try to change the behavior. What about that stuck out to you? Did you also notice that same theme? So two things on that. And just to emphasize just how sort of pervasive this or how important this new buying cell was to Celsius. So the examiner looked at, well, how much cell did Celsius ever release into the world into the marketplace through its ICO? And how much cell did it buy?
Starting point is 00:08:59 And it found that it had bought more sale than it had ever released into the community. I think they say, you know, in effect, Celsius bought every cell token once and maybe even twice, at least some of them twice. On the, you know, the other employees, I mean, that's definitely one of the things that comes out in the examiner's report, there was a certain amount of understanding amongst, you know, I guess you'd call it C-suite and managers at Celsius. People understood that what they were telling users and customers was not accurate. People understood that the business was not sustainable. They understood that, you know, the systems of processes and, you know, records that they
Starting point is 00:09:41 had weren't reliable. Effectively, you know, people knew it was a mess. You know, there was, you know, this wasn't a kind of, you know, only the chief executive knew what was going on kind of thing. People knew what was going on. And there's also some indications in the report that people were trying to fix it. And so you can read that report and you can take away two things about, you know, the people other than Alex Mersinski and the company, either that, you know, they should have blown the whistle much, much earlier. They should have alerted, you know, customers what was going on. And you could look at it the other way, which is that, you know, people were trying to fix it. You know, they weren't sort of necessarily happy with what was going on.
Starting point is 00:10:24 Yeah, yeah. No, I had the same exact two takeaways. I thought, why didn't anybody blow the whistle sooner? But then I did see, yeah, they were trying to change it internally. All right. So in a moment, we're also going to talk a little bit more about the balance sheet of Celsius, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. Join over 50 million people using crypto.com.
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Starting point is 00:11:52 Via Rail, love the way. Back to my conversation with Cadam. One of the biggest revelations was that Celsius had a hole in its balance sheet as early as the beginning of 2021. Can you talk a little bit about what Shoba Palais found there? Yeah, so in a way, everything comes back to this maniacal buying of sale all the time. And so what the examiner describes is that, you know, in around 2021, obviously the price of, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum had been rising. And Celsius realized it's had a problem. It had been using the coins that users have been given them to purchase sell. And suddenly, now it has this
Starting point is 00:12:36 big coin deficit because it's spent it all on propping up the price of sale. The price of Bitcoin has risen significantly. And now in dollar terms, that whole. is very large. And Celsius does an interesting thing to fix it. They used other customer coins. So we've got a gap of Bitcoin. We're going to use the other Bitcoin that we have, that we haven't spent. We're going to use that as collateral to borrow stable coins. So we're going to go out and get loans using this user Bitcoin as collateral. Then we're going to use the stable coins that we've got to buy Bitcoin to plug the Bitcoin hole. And so they've got this big balance sheet hole, which, is like a deficit in stable coins. And there's a very stark chart in the examiner's report,
Starting point is 00:13:20 which shows that if you exclude the cell token, so the inflated price of cell is disguising this whole, you know, for, you know, at least since 2021. But you can see that there's been a, there's been an overall coin deficit for a long time. It's been in stable coins. Now, what happens when it goes bankrupt is, you know, people want their Bitcoin back. Celsius has to unwind these loans, has to pay back the stable coins to get the Bitcoin collateral back, to give it back to users. And you have the sort of double tension where users want the Bitcoin. They have to give Bitcoin back to pay off their loans to get the Bitcoin back. And then that whole becomes sort of unavoidable.
Starting point is 00:13:59 Yeah, it's really the work, actually the even more worrying thing here is the reason why the examiner says that it began in 2021 is not because she knows for sure that's the case. It's because she's only been able to reconstruct the records going back that far. Oh. So it may even have been earlier. Wow. It looks that way given the fact. Well, I guess that chart starts in May 2021, and the deficit is already quite large at that point. Right.
Starting point is 00:14:27 So clearly it happened earlier, but we don't know quite when. Yeah, I think, honestly, I feel there are so many echoes of the FTX situation because obviously, obviously, you know, they both had their exchange token that they were trying to prop the price up of. And then both of them also were using as collateral to like essentially take out good money, but that's what eventually buried them both. So one other thing that I wanted to ask about here was, you know, I think the part that shocks me is what you were saying before about how the rewards rate was not related at all to how much money they were actually making when they were lending out those funds. And it feels like they could have just had a sustainable business if they've just done it that way.
Starting point is 00:15:16 And so, you know, I don't know what your take is on kind of why they didn't, or I think in this case it was really Alex Mishinsky who decided not to just try to go the sustainable route. Yeah, I think there's a couple of things there. One is there was this mentality and the examiner really attributes this very individually to Alex Mersinski, that they should be going for growth. And so the important thing was just to attract users in, you know, in very large quantities. There's obviously a question mark over that, given the precarious financial situation it's in. And, you know, so is the reason why you need lots of new users all the time because you're
Starting point is 00:15:58 in a precarious financial situation? The second thing is that it appears that it was not necessarily well understood within Celsius exactly how much money it was or wasn't making or exactly what its profitability was. And this is in part because they just had extraordinarily bad records. And so there seems to be a realization in, I think, in early 2022. And the other thing actually to remember is that there's, you know, different people joining the company into like new risk officer or, you know, that kind of financial officer, that kind of thing.
Starting point is 00:16:35 And so it appears in early 2022, people begin. to realize, like, wait, we are paying, or, you know, quote unquote rewards in far and access of what we're actually making. Like, we do not have positive net interest margins. We are paying users more than we can, we make and that we could possibly expect to make. And, you know, in the examiner's report, you can see Alex Monski resisting that. And I think he says, there's a, there's a quote there where he tells the CFO to stay in his lane, you know, you know, marketing is my job. I've brought in $20 billion, which is what it's sort of balance sheet size was at that time. And I can bring in more. That's sort of a paraphrase of the interaction. That was certainly a problem
Starting point is 00:17:21 that it was not, the reason it was paying out the race that it was was not actually tied to what you could actually make. Yeah, I also remember reading that interaction in the report. And yeah, just my eyes widening. So another factor here was that Celsius also had considerable losses in certain investments. Some of them were reported in the news previously, but can you talk a little bit about those? Yeah, so some of them are, I think you could probably characterize some of them as bad luck, and you could characterize some of them as poor investment decisions. So it took out a massive loan using its customer Bitcoin as collateral, and the counterparty
Starting point is 00:18:05 ended up not being able to return that collateral, in part because the price of Bitcoin had risen so substantially. And it appears that the counterparty had just sold the collateral. And therefore, you know, the price had risen a lot. They were short and they couldn't pay it back immediately. There's stuff like there's a company called Steakound, which seems to have just lost the keys to the Ethereum that Celsius had, I think, loaned to them or staked with them. But they were, you know, they made really large bets on GBT, the gray scale Bitcoin Trust, and really
Starting point is 00:18:40 sort of, I guess, funny in a kind of grim way, but in December 2020, when the GBT were still at a premium, they were talking about dramatically increasing their bets on GBTC. And then obviously, you know, I think the very next month or the month after that, it went to
Starting point is 00:18:56 a discount and the state is a discount ever since. So, Celsius is like a lot of crypto investors had this loss from from piling into the GPTC trade. And the key thing that the examiner points out about these investments, these bad investments, is that one,
Starting point is 00:19:17 Celsius didn't tell customers that that's what it was going to do. It told customers that they was going to do institutional lending. And secondly, it didn't tell customers about these enormous losses. And so, you know, people in mid-2020 or late-2021, you know, would have no idea, that Celsius was not only sitting on a big balance sheet hole from all the money you were spending on propping up the sell token, but it was also sitting on significant losses from these bad investment decisions. And I think she really points out that in 2021, you know, 2021 was the
Starting point is 00:19:50 crypto bill year. Lots of companies made enormous profits, at least on paper. Celsius made an enormous loss in 2021, you know, the year that everyone else made money. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's It's shocking on a number of levels, although I guess in a way we sort of knew that this just confirms. So out of curiosity, based off this report, do you think, or are you hearing anything about whether or not Mishinsky could face either fraud charges or even prison time? So we know that the DOJ is investigating Celsius. We know that there's been a long-running SEC investigation, which would be civil, not criminal. we also know the New York Attorney General has already sued him.
Starting point is 00:20:36 So there's clearly like a lot of pressure and attention and scrutiny of his conduct. You know, I don't want to say, you know, what's going to happen next? But, you know, I mean, clearly, clearly that's a risk for him, clearly. One other thing that I want to ask about is that after these findings from the report, state officials called for a similar independent examiner to conduct, you know, a similar independent report on the financials of FTX, Alameda, and their subsidiaries. Do you think the revelations here could influence that decision? I don't know the extent that it's going to influence the judge. I mean, the situation in FTX is that you have the, you know, you have the new FTX management.
Starting point is 00:21:19 They oppose the opposing your examiner. So does the creditors committee. So does the Bahamas, you know, liquidators. They all oppose it. You have the trustee, you know, filing. this motion to appoint one, it's clearly helpful for the trustee that you have now, you know, I think 17 or more states, you know, also supporting a motion for an examiner. But what it does show, I think, is I guess the value to the broader creditor base and to the public of these appointments, because you get, you know, the DOJ is not going, you know, it's prosecuting Sam Rankin-Fried. It's not going to write, like, a big report about what happened. You know, the FTCX, the debtors and the creditors committee,
Starting point is 00:22:02 they're interested in, you know, pursuing claims, right? It's not their job to write a big report explaining to people what's happened. And also, they're not, you know, they're not strictly, you know, independent from what's going on exactly. You know, they're involved in the process. If you get an independent examiner, you get this accounting of what's happened from somebody who's unbiased, who's not involved, who wasn't involved previously in any way. I think, I think it's sort of vital for the broader creditor understanding, but also the broader public understanding of what happened to these companies. Yeah, no, I agree.
Starting point is 00:22:38 I mean, granted, you and I are both journalists, so we probably have the same view that the more information, the better. But I do understand, you know, these are expensive or they can be. And that's the concern, I think, from those parties who oppose it. All right, well, this has been a fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for coming on unchanged. Thank you. It's been fun. Don't forget, next up is the weekly news recap. Stick around for this week in crypto after this short break.
Starting point is 00:23:06 Thanks for tuning in to this week's news recap. SPF is accused of misusing Robin Hood shares. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of bankrupt crypto exchange, FTC, is facing allegations of criminal misuse of customer property and concealing his actions by the Department of Justice. According to federal prosecutors, Bankman Freed used 56 million Robin Hood shares. as a means to misuse customer money, which they outlined in a letter to U.S. bankruptcy judge, Lewis Kaplan. The shares were acquired with the FTCS co-founder Gary Wang through a foreign special purpose vehicle with no connection to FTCS or Alameda.
Starting point is 00:23:44 The prosecutors have taken control of the Robin Hood shares and other assets worth over $700 million. Despite these accusations, Bankman Freed's legal team is arguing that he should still have access to his crypto assets, claiming that the government has found no evidence that he was behind unauthorized transfers made by Alameda wallets. SPF is not only being restricted financially, but also in communication. A recent court ruling by Judge Kaplan has banned SPF from having any communication with current or former employees from FTX and Alameda, aside from immediate family members. The ruling came after the crypto mogul was accused of attempting to contact a potential witness in his case through the
Starting point is 00:24:27 encrypted messaging platform signal. That person is believed to be FTX U.S. General Counsel Ryan Miller. Judge Kaplan deemed the restrictions necessary until a further determination can be made, which will be discussed by both legal teams on February 7th. The restrictions were originally put forth as a modification of Bankman-Freed's bail. According to the court filing, the judge believes the evidence supporting the restrictions was clearly and convincingly sufficient. Judge Kaplan has also ordered that the names of the two people who co-signed the $250 million bail bond for Sam Bankben-Fried should be revealed to the public. Previously, only the fact that Bankben-Fried's parents were among the co-signers was known, but the identities of the others were kept confidential. The judge has now ruled in favor of various news organizations that submitted petitions to make the names public.
Starting point is 00:25:19 However, the ruling is temporarily suspended pending a possible appeal until at least February 7th. And for those who are house hunting, it may be your lucky day, as a house in Washington, D.C., with ties to SPF, is now available for purchase, listed at a price of $3.3 million. Alameda Research, the trading shop related to FTX, is taking legal action against Voyager Digital, seeking to recover $445.8 million. According to the lawsuit, Alameda claims that it repaid Voyager that amount in September and October, just prior to its own bankruptcy and is now looking to retrieve those funds to repay creditors through a process known as a clawback. In its claim, Alameda alleges that Voyager played a role in its own alleged misconduct by acting as a lender, either knowingly or recklessly. However, Voyager and its creditor committee denied this motion. The creditors are expecting
Starting point is 00:26:15 Alameda's clawback request to be either reclassified as equity or made secondary to all other claims. The creditors argue that Alameda's false statements about its financial strength were the main reason for Voyager's purchase of loans from its insolvent balance sheet. BlockFi is granted approval to sell crypto mining assets. A U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey has given the green light for crypto lender BlockFi to sell off its cryptocurrency mining equipment. In a recent filing, the court deemed the sale of these assets to be fair and reasonable in the current circumstances. BlockFi has set a deadline of February 20th, for interested parties to submit their bids, and all bids must be filed with the court by March 2nd. Creditors have until March 16th to raise any objections to the sales to qualified bidders.
Starting point is 00:27:03 Additionally, BlockFi was allowed to offer bonuses to its top employees by Judge Kaplan, who cited the need to retain and maximize the company's estate. Gemini is under investigation. The New York State Department of Financial Services is looking into allegations against crypto exchange Gemini regarding claims about its connections to the federal deposit insurance corporation or FDIC in reference to its earn accounts. According to a report by Axios, some customers were under the impression that their funds in the earn accounts were insured by the FDIC, based on Gemini's references to the agency and its communications. However, it seems that Gemini was referring to its
Starting point is 00:27:41 deposits at external banks rather than its own products, leading to confusion and claims of misleading behavior. The Federal Deposit Insurance Act prohibits entities from implying that an uninsured product is FDIC insured through the use of FDIC in its name or advertisements. Grayscale faces a lawsuit over GBDC's advertising. On a similar note, Osprey Funds, additional asset management company, has filed a lawsuit against Grayscale investments for unfair and deceptive acts and unfair competition. The complaint alleges that Grayscale misled investors, to believe that their Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, or GPDC, would be converted to an exchange-traded fund. Osprey claims that the alleged false advertising allowed Grayscale to maintain a 99.5% market share
Starting point is 00:28:31 while charging four times Osprey's fees. Brayscale is currently contesting the SEC's rejection of the ETF conversion in a separate lawsuit against the regulator, with oral arguments scheduled for March 7th. Last week, Grayskill CEO Michael Sondenshine was on Unchained to discuss everything about the ongoing lawsuit against the SEC, and he said he was certain Grayscale had the best arguments to win the case. Abraham Eisenberg waves bail. Abraham Eisenberg, the self-proclaimed $114 million exploiter of Mango Markets, a Solana Defi Protocol, has given up his right to bail at a recent hearing in New York. He faces legal action from Mango Labs who were seeking to recover the $47 million Eisenberg kept as a bounty and has been charged by federal prosecutors with three crimes, including commodities fraud,
Starting point is 00:29:24 commodities manipulation, and wire fraud. Eisenberg was arrested in Puerto Rico in December and was later transferred to New York, where he will remain in jail until February 14th at the earliest. Silvergate halts dividend to preserve liquidity. Silvergate, the publicly traded cryptocurrency bank, that's come on everyone's radar due to its ties with FDX has temporarily stopped distributing dividends. The decision was made to maintain a highly liquid balance sheet and help the bank manage the recent market instability. However, on Tuesday, after Black Rock revealed that it holds a 7.2% stake
Starting point is 00:30:00 in Silvergate Capital as of December 31st, the stock price of the bank experienced a significant increase. Furthermore, three U.S. senators sent a letter to Silvergate's CEO Alan L. Lane, alleging that the bank's dealings with FDX further introduced risk into the traditional banking system. They demanded more information about a large cash loan Silvergate took out from the Federal Home Loan Bank, or FHLB, to shore up its accounts after mass user withdrawals. The senators raised concerns that if Silvergate were to fail, the FHLB could have priority over other creditors, including the FDIC insurance fund, which could leave the FTIC and therefore the American taxpayer holding the bag, they wrote.
Starting point is 00:30:45 Ethereum developers hit another milestone for the network's next upgrade. Barnabas Boussa, an Ethereum developer, revealed on Twitter that Jezhang, Ethereum's first public test net for withdrawals, is now operational. Participants can access funds from designated sources, generate private keys with the Wagu tools by Steakhouse, which makes staking easier. make deposits through launchpad, and monitor it through the beacon chain. Six days after the launch of Jezhong, i.e. on February 7th, Shanghai and Kaplan testaments will be triggered at Epic 13050. Following this upgrade, individuals will be able to experiment with partial
Starting point is 00:31:22 and complete withdrawals, among other features. Speaking of Ethereum, the total number of Ether tokens in circulation fell to a new post-merge low, with approximately $120.5 million. This is possibly due to Ethereum's burn mechanism, which is similar to a stock buyback in traditional companies, triggered by the spike in user activity. Coinbase temporarily halts new mince. Coinbase NFT, an endeavor that is seen low transaction volumes, recently announced a temporary halt on new NFT releases, following an artist's announcement on Twitter that their upcoming
Starting point is 00:31:57 NFT drop would not be launching on the marketplace. In a related note, the Defiance Digital Revolution ETF, known as NFTZ and marketed as the first ETF for NFTs is shutting down and will be liquidated by February 28th. Twitter may integrate crypto onto its platform. The Financial Times reported that Twitter is pursuing regulatory clearance to incorporate payment options, including the possibility of crypto payments on its platform. The company is in the process of obtaining the necessary licenses and designing the software needed. The move is part of Elon Musk's administration.
Starting point is 00:32:34 attempt to turn Twitter into a super app. A small team led by executive Esther Crawford is overseeing the project. Musk has previously stated that he wants to diversify the company's revenue streams by adding payment capabilities to Twitter. Time for fun vits. Unchained's new social media manager is Ginny Hogan, who is also a stand-up comedian. She's been doing funny takes on the crypto news on the Unchained social media channels. Here's one on another update from Celsius this week. Cryptolender Celsius. Not to be confused with the energy drink Celsius, which unlike the crypto lender will at least temporarily boost your mood. I'll only 1,419 page court filing on Tuesday stating that eligible users will soon be allowed to withdraw about 94% of their assets. That's like the length
Starting point is 00:33:21 of two Lord of the Rings books said way too many of Celsius's creditors. You guys know they make books for adults. Now this should be good news. I mean 94% also sounds like a lot, unless of course it's your assets. For what it's worth, I think it's possible that we share like 94% of our DNA with the toaster oven. Or just a couple of tiny catches. Transfers need to be less than $7,575 when they were first made. You also need enough money on the platform to cover your gas and transaction fees. You need to update your customer information and you need to be at least 5'8.
Starting point is 00:33:52 Oh wait, sorry, sorry. I'm thinking in my hinge. These users will find out whether or not they're ready to start the withdrawal process on February 15th. That's right. Some single Celsius users are about to have two. very dark days in a row. I urge you to subscribe to our Instagram and TikTok or the Unchained Twitter feed to find more hilarious clips from Ginny. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Starting point is 00:34:14 To learn more about Catam and the developments around Celsius's bankruptcy, check the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with up from Anthony Yun, Mark Murdoch, Matt Pilchard, Zach Seward, Juan Aranovich, Sam Shre Rum, Ginny Hogan, Ben Munster, Pamajumdar, Shishonk, and CLK transcription. Thanks for listening.

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