Celsius stops lifting because the pressure on the crypto loan platform increases

Celsius Network has stopped the withdrawals due to "extreme market conditions", since the $ 12 billion platform for lending digital assets is increasingly being stressed by a broad withdrawal on the entire cryptocurrency market.

The group has been exposed to increasing pressure in the past few weeks, since investors flee the market for crypto-return products in which retailers give their tokens against high fixed returns.

Celsius said on Monday that "all payments, swaps and transfers between accounts" to "put it in a better position in order to comply with its payout obligations over time".

The company founded in 2017 is one of the largest players in the crypto industry. Last year, the company collected $ 400 million in an equity financing round under the direction of Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, Canada's second largest pension fund, and West Cap, the fund, which was founded by the former Airbnb and Blackstone Manager Laurence Tosi.

The step of Celsius weakened the mood on the market for the awarding of more established digital tokens as security to support new cryptocurrency projects. Last month, the Terra and Luna tokens- which formed the basis of another popular yield platform- broke together within a few days.

The value of the assets stored on the platform of Celsius shrank from more than $ 24 billion to less than $ 12 billion on May 17th.

Celsius, which has branches in the United States, Great Britain and Lithuania, said that freezing the possibility of customers of lifting their funds, "for the advantage of our entire community, has been carried out in order to stabilize liquidity and operation while we take measures to maintain and protect assets".

"Celsius has valuable assets and we are working hard to meet our obligations," wrote the group in a medium contribution in which she announced the news.

The recent problems at Celsius gave the wider cryptoma market a difficult blow. Ether, which is considered an indicator of the mood for digital-asset projects that offer investors high returns, lost a fifth of its value, according to the refinitive data, and was traded at $ 1,321. Bitcoin, the most active cryptocurrency worldwide, fell 12 percent to just over $ 25,000, the lowest level since December 2020.

Coin -known to the group's own through the ticker CEL, has lost half of its value in the last 24 hours, as data from CryptoCcompare show.

The platform had been confronted with questions from customers last week, who said they could not make any payments. CEO Alex Mashinsky asked critics at the weekend to "find even one person who has a problem with resignation".

Additional reporting by William Langley in Hong Kong