How badly I got burned by Celsius

C4m3...BjR8

8 Mar 2024

With Celsius finally paying out to its creditors (including me), I thought I'd share how much I lost as a result of the platform going bankrupt. After all, other P0Xers such as BitcoinBaby and WinterYeti have been very open about their own losses.

Holdings

Celsius froze withdrawals on 13 June 2022, and this is the crypto I was holding there at the time (along with the US dollar value then):

ETH 0.056300 ($81.90)
BCH 0.264811 ($39.10)
CEL 130.8858 ($37.05)
BTC 0.000436 ($11.67)
ZEC 0.034977 ($2.80)
LTC 0.009514 ($0.46)

That comes to a total of $172.98. Most of it was crypto I'd earned (apart from the CEL, which I'd bought with crypto I'd earned).

Payback

And this is what I got back (via Coinbase) on 13 February 2024, along with the value on that day:

BTC 0.001188 ($59.47)
ETH 0.017756 ($47.20)

Losses

So that comes to a total of $106.67. Subtracting one total from the other gives a loss of $66.31, or 38% of the value of my assets. That's less painful, proportionally, than the losses suffered by many other Celsians.
But I could look it at another way: what would my original assets have been worth on 13 February 2024? I've done the sums, and it comes to $273.51. So you could say my actual loss is £166.84, or 61% of the February 2024 value of my assets.
And even that is understating things, because my Celsius holdings included a lot of CEL - the value of which dipped considerably (and unsurprisingly) around the time that Celsius went bankrupt. Even just three months previously, my CEL had 10x the value.
There's also the opportunity cost of having had a bunch of assets frozen for nearly two years.
One funny thing about the whole Celsius fiasco is that it has actually increased my position in BTC. That's because creditors were paid only in BTC and ETH, whereas a lot of my holdings were in other currencies. Effectively it's the slowest and most expensive swap I've ever done...