Celsius Demands 6,360 BTC Back From BitMEX After Liquidations
The Celsius estate says BitMEX was responsible for forced liquidations during the Covid crash. The claim comes as the exchange stops trading on September 23.
Key Takeaways
- Celsius is demanding 6,360 BTC back from BitMEX through its estate after forced liquidations during the Covid crash in March 2020.
- The coins are now worth about $495 million, according to the complaint, and the case was filed on September 12 in New York.
- Celsius and BitMEX are clashing over trading practices, while the allegations have not yet been proven.
The bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network is demanding 6,360 BTC back from BitMEX through its estate after forced liquidations during the Covid crash in March 2020. The coins are now worth about $495 million (€429 million). The case was filed on September 12 with the U.S. bankruptcy court in New York.
Lawsuit in New York
The complaint was filed by Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium, the party appointed in the Celsius bankruptcy to collect claims. The case names HDR Global Trading, ABS Global Trading, Shine Effort, 100x Holdings, and HDR Global Services as defendants. According to Celsius, those entities are spread across Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, England, Hong Kong, the Seychelles, and the U.S.
Celsius says it lost 1,325.84 BTC in a single liquidation on March 12, 2020. A day later, investment fund JST allegedly lost another 5,034.33 BTC. Both positions were only profitable if Bitcoin stayed flat or rose. The complaint also says BitMEX controlled both the liquidation system and the insurance fund behind it.
Clash With Celsius's Story
The lawsuit clashes with how Celsius presented itself for years. The company paid interest on customer deposits and marketed itself as a provider of low-risk, delta-neutral strategies such as arbitrage, funding-rate harvesting, and carry trades. But in a bankruptcy filing from July 2022, Celsius said it was actually using several highly speculative derivatives and asset deployment mechanisms behind those claims. The court-appointed examiner later reached a similar conclusion.
That background makes the current claim especially sensitive for crypto followers. Celsius collapsed in 2022 with a large hole in its balance sheet, and the case against BitMEX shows once again how much damage the early leverage years of the crypto market can still cause. For European readers, the key point is that bankruptcy cases like this often drag on for years and can keep producing legal claims for a long time.
BitMEX Steps Back
The lawsuit is the second one against BitMEX since the company announced in July that it would wind down. The crypto exchange stops trading on September 23. That gives the case extra weight, because the estate is now trying to recover value from a period that many traders still associate with extreme liquidations and high risk.
The allegations have not been proven. Still, the case fits into the broader fallout from the collapse of FTX and other major shocks in the sector, where old trading positions, bankruptcies, and claims keep overlapping.
