Bitcoin and other crypto majors are holding pretty steady as we head towards the end of the first week in 2023 for crypto. Meanwhile Celsius users have received a shock and crypto-contagion fallout fears continue to surround Digital Currency Group (DCG).

Let’s talk about Celsius first.

 

Judge decrees US$4b of assets will stay with Celsius

Users of the once-very-popular-now-bankrupt crypto-lending platform Celsius have been given some unwelcome news from a serious-looking bloke in a wig in the US.

Per a report from The Defiant, Chief US Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn has decreed that more than US$4 billion in crypto deposited in the platform’s “Earn Accounts” do not actually belong to the 600,000 or so customers who made the deposits.

Celsius halted withdrawals from its crypto-yield-generating platform in June last year, citing “extreme market conditions” and filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July.

The ruling states that the assets instead belong to Celsius’s estate. And that’s because, reasoned Judge Glenn, Celsius’s terms of use states that the company held “all right and title to such Eligible Digital Assets, including ownership rights.”

“If the cryptocurrency assets in the Earn Accounts are owned by [Celsius], the Account Holders are unsecured creditors, and their recovery depends on the distributions to unsecured creditors under a confirmed chapter 11 plan, or under the Bankruptcy Code’s priority rules in the event of liquidation,” wrote Glenn in the ruling.

“A fundamental principle of the Bankruptcy Code is equality of distribution. There simply will not be enough value available to repay all Account Holders in full,” added Glenn.

It really is a cruel world.

 

New York AG sues former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky

But hang on a sec, perhaps all is not lost for all Celsius Earn users. New York Attorney General Letitia James is on the case for hapless investors, having now filed a lawsuit against Alex Mashinsky, co-founder and former CEO of Celsius Network.

James noted that she’s “suing to get New Yorkers their money back and ban Mashinsky from doing business in New York.”

For all the other global Celsius users who have their funds in limbo, let’s hope any success the AG achieves extends beyond the state of New York.

 

Top 10 overview

With the overall crypto market cap at US$852 billion, as flat as the Nullabor since this time yesterday, here’s the current state of play among top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

Not a lot to report regarding the crypto majors since this time yesterday, so let’s check in with some prominent Twitter-based chart watchers and see what they have to say…

We give you Dutch trader and analyst Michaël van de Poppe, who’s reasonably positive for a relief rally while highlighting the potential crypto-contagion risk surrounding Grayscale/DCG/Genesis:

Meanwhile, are the bears starting to pivot? Not necessarily, but US trader “Roman Trading” for instance, who was pretty bearish on Bitcoin’s price action for the vast majority of 2022, had this to say:

 

Then there’s Australian-born New Yorker Bob Loukas –  a trader with more than 25 years’ experience and a Bitcoin-investing OG. He seems to also be seeing a potentially significant relief rally on the cards.

 

Uppers and downers: 11–100

Sweeping a market-cap range of about US$6.6 billion to about US$289 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour gainers and losers at press time. (Stats accurate at time of publishing, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPERS

Chiliz (CHZ), (market cap: US$598 million) +7%

• eCash (XEC), (mc: US$480 million) +6%

• BitDAO (BIT), (mc: US$453 million) +5%

• Monero (XMR), (mc: US$2.8 billion) +3%

• Axie Infinity (AXS), (mc: US$780 million) +2%

 

DAILY SLUMPERS

Huobi (HT), (market cap: US$751 million) -11%

Ethereum Classic (ETC), (market cap: US$2.5 billion) -5%

Casper Network (CSPR), (mc: US$304 million) -5%

NEXO (NEXO), (mc: US$396 million) -4%

Arweave (AR), (mc: US$333 million) -4%

 

Around the blocks

Some pertinence and randomness that stuck with us on our morning moves through the Crypto Twitterverse…

This does NOT sound good regarding DCG – the world’s largest digital assets manager. Perhaps it needs to hurry up and collapse so we can finally begin to get through the other side of the ongoing Terra and FTX-related crypto contagion.

Still, this is perhaps slightly better news. Depending on what you think about BlackRock, of course.