Mashinsky resigns as the head of Celsius Network

The head of the crypto loan Celsius Network, Alex Mashinsky, resigned on Tuesday with an apology with customers for the "difficult financial circumstances" in which she had left the company's bankruptcy.

Celsius applied for insolvency protection in July and said that it had a $ 1.2 billion hole in its balance sheet, which made it one of the best-known victims of the crash on the cryptoma markets at the beginning of this year.

The lender has hundreds of thousands of customers who have deposited crypto with the company, which has promised double -digit interest rates for some assets, and are now faced with considerable losses in their savings.

The sudden resignation took place two months after the start of insolvency proceedings, which for Celsius customers has not yet had to clarify when and how much they can get back from their money.

"I regret that my continued role as managing director has increasingly become a distraction, and I am very sorry about the difficult financial circumstances with the members of our community," said Mashinsky in a letter to the Celsius board. (He remains director of the Celsius mother company.)

Mashinsky, a former telecommunications entrepreneur who founded Celsius in 2017, added that he had committed to helping Celsius to "work out and promote" a plan for the company in order to "return assets in a fairest and efficient way" to the believers.

In the past few weeks, internal meetings at Celsius have pointed out that the company may propose a restructuring in which customers receive a crypto token replacement for their claims and at the same time open a new business based on the provision of custodian services.

The collapse of Celsius at the beginning of this year shook the cryptoma markets. It was the first major crypto company that freely freely found customer accounts in June and thus gave the starting signal for a market crisis that reflected several start-ups for digital assets.

The competing crypto broker Voyager Digital, another company that offered interest on crypto tokens, also went bankrupt. On Tuesday, Voyager said that it had agreed to sell his assets to FTX US, the crypto exchange led by Sam Bankman-Fried.

Mashinsky was heavily criticized as a result of bankruptcy, and the angry customers submitted letters to the court in which they claimed that they were misleaded during the weekly YouTube appearances with which he had advertised for Celsius.

The complaints were repeated by the state security authority of Vermont, who claimed in a court file that Celsius had carried out something at least two years before his collapse.

Celsius was supported by two large blue chip investors, Westcap and Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, Canada's second largest pension fund, which at the end of last year cited a round of funding in the amount of USD 600 million

In July, CDPQ wrote down its $ 150 million investment in Celsius and admitted that it started “too early” in crypto.