Equitiesfirst is an unmanagent debtor of the battered crypto company Celsius

A mysterious debtor of Celsius Network, to which the insolvency applications of the crypto loan are referred to, is equities, a specialized financial company that is best known to award cash to managers that are secured by their stock stocks.

The CEO of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, said on Thursday in a legal proceedings that his company was $ 439 million from a "private loan platform" that he did not identify. Two people familiar with the matter said that the platform was equities.

The money that owes equities based in Indianapolis forms a significant part of Celsius' assets, which hundreds of thousands of its customers are relying on to recover at least part of their savings.

Mashinsky said in his submission to the insolvency court that Celsius liabilities of 5.5 billion

"Equitiesfirst is in ongoing talks with our customer and both parties have agreed to extend our obligations," said Equitiesfirst. Celsius did not answer a request for comment.

In the court file it says that the owed debts of $ 439 million, which were not mentioned in the document, were originally created from transactions in which Celsius was the borrower.

Celsius began in 2019 that Equitiesfirst loans started on a secure basis in order to "support your company", the submission said. Mashinsky said that there was "a lack of institutional loans for cryptocurrency companies" at the time.

In July 2021, Celsius tried to repay one of his loans and to receive the collateral pledged as security, it said in the submission, but “for the first time it was informed that the lender was not able to return the company's collateral in good time.” As a result, Celsius changed from a borrower to a company that owed $ 509 million on an unsecured basis. Cryptocurrency -assured loans are often overwhelmed, which means that a greater crypto value is pledged as security than the borrowed amount.

The debts have been slowly repaid since September last year. The current repayments amount to $ 5 million per month. The outstanding $ 439 million are made up of $ 361 million in cash and 3,765 Bitcoin, according to the file.

At the end of 2021,

Celsius raised $ 600 million of equity in a deal, which was led by the investment company Westcap and Canada's second largest pension fund Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec. The deal rated Celsius with $ 3 billion.

The Equities First debt that Celsius and Mashinsky had not yet disclosed offers a context of the difficulties with which the crypto loan was confronted this year when the crypto markets collapsed.

Celsius FROR FROR MURTIC Customer withdrawals after it had suffered a rush for his deposits and applied for insolvency protection.

at the beginning of this week

equities was founded in 2002 by Alexander Christy, who still heads the company today. It specializes in loans that are secured by corporate shares.

In an April interview with the Hubbis journal, the company's Singapore Managing Director said that Equitiesfirst started to grant loans against crypto around 2016.

"In the past we were pure stocks until we started offering loans against cryptocurrency about six years ago, and this activity has really started speed in the past few years," said the managing director.

According to the interview, the lending of Equitiesfirst in the crypto area was usually 60 percent Loan-to-Value, secured by cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and ether.

A lawyer from Equitiesfirst joined a separate US crypto insolvency on Tuesday, that of the failed hedge fund Three Arrows Capital. The file said that equities is a creditor. Hours later the lawyer submitted his resignation.