According to a sealed adversary complaint which was filed on the 6th of September, Celsius is looking for injunctive relief, as well as a declaratory judgment which would be associated with the recovery of the money, and/or property, as claimed by the docket. The filing also named both EquitiesFirst and Alexander Christy, the CEO, as defendants. Additionally, the company also went on to file the summons on the same day, which required that the private lender put out a motion or answer within the next 35 days.
For those wondering, EquitiesFirst Holdings is a private lending company based in Indianapolis, that reportedly owed the network a sum of $439 million- back in July 2022. The company first started taking collateralized loans from the company in 2019, in order to support the operations, as mentioned by Alex Mashinsky in a subsequent bankruptcy filing. This was considered to be the result of a lack of institutional lending which was available to the cryptocurrency companies.
Celsius Has Filed For Injunctive Relief Against EquitiesFirst
However, in July of 2021, Celsius then sought to retrieve this collateral that had been pledged to EquitiesFirst but was then informed that the lender would not be able to return the amount that had been provided by Celsius. As of 2021, Celsius had been owed a sum of $509 million, and this increase from $439 million was specifically due to the loans which were over-collateralized. Since September 2021, the debt has been repaid slowly- at a rate of $5 million every month.
Interestingly, Celsius Network was actually one of the major casualties of the bear market of 2022, when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on the 14th of July, 2022. Alex Mashinsky, the former CEO of the company, was then arrested on the 13th of July this year- with the authorities accusing him of misleading the users of the company.
