Celsius (CEL) is the native token of the Celsius Network, a centralized crypto and lending platform. In July 2022, Celsius filed for bankruptcy.

CEL launched in early 2018 after raising $50 million in an initial coin offering (ICO). CEL rose from its ICO price of 30 cents to $8.02 in June 2021. After the market crashed the following year, CEL had fallen to 68 cents by June 2022. CEL fell sharply from $2 in March 2022, when one of the stablecoins it provided high-interest rates on, TerraUSD (UST), crashed.

CEL is on both Ethereum and Solana. It has a maximum supply of 695 million tokens. As of June 2022, Celsius holds 335 million of the 423 million in circulation, or 79%.

The March 2018 initial coin offering (ICO) sold off 10% of the tokens, and a private presale that began at the end of 2017 sold 40% of the initial supply. Celsius kept 27% of the initial supply in its treasury and reserved 23% for the team and its advisers. CEL sold in the private presale funds and reserve for investors was subject to a vesting period of two years.

The company launched its app in June 2018. Its users earned interest on their holdings and could take out U.S. dollar loans against deposits of cryptocurrencies. It advertised rates of 17% and a customer base of 1.7 million.

Holders of the CEL token were given more rewards for holding or lending funds on Celsius and holding CEL in their wallets, with the biggest bag-holders receiving the biggest rewards.

Alex Mashinsky and Daniel Leon founded Celsius in 2017. Mashinsky, currently Celsius’s CEO, is a serial entrepreneur who founded three other unicorns – companies valued at more than $1 billion – in the technology industry.

Leon was a general manager at GroundLink, an on-demand ride-sharing app that Mashinsky founded in 2005. Leon quit GroundLink in 2012 and Mashinsky left in 2013 – a year after a private equity firm acquired a majority stake. It ceased operations in August 2020, citing “the catastrophic effects Covid-19 has had on the global economy and the travel industry."

Celsius has offices in New Jersey, London, Tel Aviv, Cyprus and Serbia.

In November 2021, Celsius Chief Financial Officer Yaron Shalem was arrested on suspicion of money laundering and other charges tied to his old job with Israeli crypto-mogul Moshe Hogeg. Celsius fired Shalem after the allegations surfaced.

In June 2021, the company was registered as an LLC in Delaware and registered with FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) as a money services business. The platform has lending licenses in California and Missouri under Celsius Lending LLC.

In April 2022, Celsius began phasing out high-interest accounts for non-accredited U.S. investors following regulatory action and fines against Celsius’s main competitor, BlockFi.

When UST crashed in June, data analytics platform Nansen said that wallets associated with Celsius contributed to the de-pegging of the failed US dollar stablecoin. Amid the UST crash, Celsius removed half a billion dollars from Anchor, a decentralized lending protocol tied to UST. Since the liquidity pools for stablecoins were relatively thin, the dash to the exit decoupled UST’s price from the U.S. dollar, according to Nansen.

In June 2021, Celsius paused customer withdrawals after Three Arrows Capital, a Singaporean crypto hedge fund that also went bankrupt (but at its peak held $11 billion in assets under management, or AUM), failed to repay its loans shortly after the crash of UST.

In July, Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allows a court to supervise the restructuring of its debts. In the filing, Celsius cited a $1.19 billion hole in its balance sheet and considered users “unsecured creditors” – meaning that they’d receive a pro rata cut of the funds left after bankruptcy proceedings.