These last 4 days have been filled with quite a bit of action in the crypto lending sphere. In normal fashion, though it continues to be a mixture of good and bad news it does help provide some more clarity on the status of really the centralized lending space as a whole. 

Voyager

Last Friday the judge presiding over Voyager's bankruptcy proceedings in New York approved the company to return $270 million in customer funds that were held in the Metropolitan Commercial Bank. This $270 million was not in any crypto rather it was customer cash deposits that were frozen when the bankruptcy filing occurred. It may not seem that returning these funds is a huge step but it is as it is the first time the customers will receive some of their assets back. 

During the same hearing, Voyager provided the court with an update on its potential sale or merger with another company. Since they entered bankruptcy they have had 88 different interested parties contact them and those are in various stages. The final bid deadline is set for August 26 with August 31 being the sale objective deadline and finally a sale hearing on September 7th. It is encouraging to see the progress and interest that has occurred with the company and hopefully it continues to move at the speed that it is so that more assets can be freed up for more customers. 

Celsius

Today Celsius withdrew a motion that was not very well known and appeared to be submitted and sneakily done. A few days ago it came out that Celsius wanted to bring back their former Chief Financial Officer (CFO) back for a cool $92,000 PER MONTH! The motion fired would have paid him $750,000 a year and given him a performance-based cash bonus of up to $562,500. For a company that is in bankruptcy, it was something that was pretty hard to fathom occurring with so many people having their funds locked up due to the state of the company. 

The reason that Celsius gave in the motion for bringing him back was that he was familiar with the debtors' business and stated that he had tried to steady the business during his short 5-month tenure. This fell on deaf ears though as customers were outraged and one individual even filed an objection to bringing him back with the court. Common sense says that Celsius read the room and saw the outrage and made the smarter choice to withdraw it and dodge a hearing that would have been brutal on them. 

Hodlnaut

Sadly a favorite of this platform has fallen. After seemingly staying ahead and dodging all of the other perils that hit other lenders Hodlnaut has joined the rest in halting withdrawals. As someone who has used their service and had nothing but good things to say about them, I am bummed to see this happen. Hodlnaut did one thing that I felt protected them much better than others and that was having rates that while better than a standard savings account were not crazy high. I do think this protected them for this long before finally the options had been exhausted. What I did not know about till today was that Hodlnaut was one of Celsius' institutional clients so that was something that bogged them down.  Due to freezing transactions, Hodlnaut did take the step to go ahead and withdraw their license application from Singapore regulators for digital services. Unlike others who announced and went silent Hodlnaurt has said that they will be issuing their next updates on August 19th so more will be known about the state of funds then. 

Please know I am not a financial advisor and make sure you do your own research! If you enjoyed this article and would like to further support me below are a few referral links that if you used when signing up I would appreciate it! Also, follow me on Twitter @Cje95_

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