Crypto lender Celsius halts withdrawals due to ‘extreme market conditions’

theguardian.com:

The cryptocurrency lending platform Celsius Network has halted withdrawals because of “extreme market conditions” as the value of the digital asset market slipped below $1tn (£820bn).

Bitcoin dropped to a 17-month low of $23,880 after the Celsius announcement, while Ether, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, dropped more than 15% to $1,250, its lowest since January 2021.

The total value of the cryptocurrency market fell below $1tn on Monday after the sell-off, according to the data site CoinMarketCap, which had valued the market at almost $3tn in November.

Celsius said in a blogpost it was “pausing” all withdrawals and transfers between accounts for its 1.7 million customers. The company offers customers high interest rates – as much as 18% – on their cryptocurrency deposits and pays the interest in crypto assets, which includes its own token, called CEL.

“Due to extreme market conditions, today we are announcing that Celsius is pausing all withdrawals, swap, and transfers between accounts,” the platform said. “We are taking this action today to put Celsius in a better position to honour, over time, its withdrawal obligations.”

On 7 June Celsius published a blog seeking to reassure customers amid volatile conditions in the cryptocurrency markets, triggered initially by a collapse in the crypto project Terra.

Headlined “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”, the blog said the company had not had “any issues meeting withdrawal requests”. Celsius has offices in London, New York and Lithuania.

Celsius’s website tells customers they can “borrow like a billionaire”. It has $11.8bn in assets, down from more than $24bn in December last year. In November it said it had raised $750m from investors including Caisse de