Summary:
- Celsius Network has reportedly laid off 150 staff members who constitute 25% of its workforce.
- The team behind the lending platform had last month hired restructuring advisors.
- Celsius Network has also put forward three proposals for rebuilding through Bnk to The Future Capital: a restructuring to launch Celsius, a pool of most influential whales in Bitcoin to co-invest with the community, and an operational plan that allows a new entity to rebuild and make depositors whole.
The crypto lending platform Celsius Network has allegedly laid off 150 employees who constitute 25% of its workforce. According to a report by CalCalistech.com, the laid-off employees include those residing in Israel, where the company has an office. The team at WuBlockchain also shared similar news of layoffs at Celsius through the following tweet.
Lending platform Celsius has laid off about 150 employees, including those in Israel, according to Israeli media Calcalistech. The layoffs represent about a quarter of Celsius' total workforce. Many of Celsius' businesses are run by third-party platforms. https://t.co/dZtQG35mRE
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) July 3, 2022
News of employees of Celsius Network being laid off came almost two weeks after the company hired restructuring advisors from law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. The move was aimed at advising Celsius Network on possible solutions for its ongoing financial issues.
Celsius Network Proposes Three Solutions.
At the beginning of this month, the Celsius Network team also put forth three proposals to rebuild the lending platform. The three proposals were published by Bnk to The Future Capital, who mentioned that they had been ‘engaged by Celsius to manage the community part of their $750m Series ‘B’ funding round.’
According to the team at Bnk to The Future Capital, which also holds 5% of Celsius Network shares, a community is needed to find lasting solutions for the lending platform. Therefore, the following three solutions were proposed:
- A restructuring of Celsius Network and eventual relaunch. This will allow depositors to benefit from any recovery through financial engineering.
- The most influential Bitcoin whales to form a pool to co-invest with the community, similar to how Bitfinex recovered after the 2016 hack.
- An operational plan which allows a new entity and team to rebuild and make depositors whole.
Traditional Finance Will Not Offer a Solution for Celsius Network – Bnk to The Future Capital CEO.
The proposals forwarded by the Bnk to The Future Capital team echo a statement made in mid-June by the company’s CEO, Simon Dixon, where he explained that traditional finance would not provide a timely solution for Celsius Network. He said:
I believe traditional finance will not have a timely solution for Celsius as we saw in the past with Mt. Gox that still remains unresolved 10 years later. I believe that this can only be solved with a solution using financial innovation like we did with Bitfinex that was resolved within 9 months and worked out very well for depositors.