Celsius Network founder withdrew $10M ahead of bankruptcy
ft.com
ft.com
> The company filed for bankruptcy in July with a $1.2bn hole in its balance sheet. The business had a peak last year of $25bn-worth of crypto assets deposited by customers attracted by the outsized interest rates Celsius offered, as high as 18 per cent on certain cryptocurrencies.
How that is not seen as a pyramid scheme by the SEC is beyond me.
Legally, it's just a game being played with "Monopoly money". The SEC isn't authorized to regulate fun and games played with non-legal tender.
In other words, he really didn't withdraw $10M USD --- he withdrew some amount of crypto that is not "legal" money.
But don't dump all the blame on the SEC.
Remember, this is exactly the way crypto bros insist it should be. All the SEC effectively did was afford Celsius, their depositors and crypto bros in general the freedom to rediscover the hard way why regulations are a necessary and vital part of any "real" financial market. Only a fool would think otherwise --- live and learn.
If Madoff would also run an exchange that first converted USD into monopoly tokens and paid out in monopoly tokens that could then be converted back it would be fine?
What if you did it with commodities? Deposit nails, get interest in nails. If the admin steals the nails it's still theft.