Bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network has started divesting of a signficnat amount of altcoins, at a time in which it faces managerial unrest after its former CEO, Alex Mashinsky, was arrested over a slew of federal charges.
According to data from on-chain analytics service Lookonchain, Celsius Network has embarked on a massive sale of its altcoin assets, including 1.27 million $LINK ($8.5 million), 2.83 million $SNX ($7.84 million), 12,597 $BNB ($3 million), 4.45 million $1INCH ($2.26 million), and 8.53 million $ZRX ($1.9 million), among other tokens.
Intriguingly, a considerable portion of the altcoins was transfered to FalconX before being moved to Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Celsius also transferred 186,149 $BONE, valued around $235,000, into the prominent crypto exchange OKX.
Notably, Lookonchain had previous revealed that Celsius largely converted its altcoin assets into Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two leading cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. The firm also seemingly moved a large amount of tokens to an Ethereum wallet addresses starting with “0x4131.”
In a notable transaction, Celsius moved 1,393 StaFi ($rETH) to Wintermute Trading, receiving an equivalent volume in Ethereum. Despite the selloff, Celsius still retains an impressive $164.5 million in altcoins within the Ethereum blockchain.
The company’s altcoin portfolio notably includes its proprietary CEL tokens, Chainlink, AAVE, Synthetix, TrueGBP, and Paxos Gold ($PAXG).
These movements came shortly after Alex Mashinsky, its former CEO, started facing a slew of federal charges, stemming from multiple U.S. agencies including the Department of Justice (DOJ), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Federal prosecutors have levelled fraud charges against Mashinsky, accusing him and others, including Celsius’s Chief Revenue Officer Roni Cohen-Pavon, of executing “a scheme to inflate the price of Celsius’s proprietary token, CEL.”
Accusations also extend to the firm’s promotional materials, which allegedly portrayed Celsius as a “modern-day bank,” when according to the DOJ Mashinsky ran Celsius more like a risky investment fund, inadvertently transforming customers into investors in a venture far riskier and less lucrative than implied. Both Mashinsky and Cohen-Pavon were taken into custody.
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