Mark Karpeles: Three Ways to Revive Mt. Gox

BnkToTheFuture, Celsius's primary investor, has outlined three options for saving the company from insolvency while ensuring that shareholders and depositors with funds stuck on the platform get a good outcome.

BnkToTheFuture CEO Simon Dixon shared the three proposals on Twitter, which can be either two options of restructuring and relaunching Celsius or co-investing with wealthy Bitcoin Whales.

"Proposal #1: A restructuring that would allow depositors to benefit from any recovery through financial engineering if the bank were relaunched.

Proposal #2: A pool of the top Bitcoin whales to co-invest with the community.

Proposal #3: A plan that allows a new entity and team to rebuild and make depositors whole.

In 2016, Bitfinex issued the equity debt tokens that were meant to be a representation of $1 worth of debt per token. This was similar to what Dixon described as "financial innovation" being necessary for Celsius's similar system to work, like in the case when the tokens were created.

The team wrote, "We believe that all attempts should be made to make depositors whole in order to maintain shareholder value." It will also call for a shareholder meeting that "can't be ignored by the Celsius board."

“Bnk To The Future Capital SPC holds over 5% of Celsius shares and therefore we believe that this allows us to call a shareholder meeting as part of our statutory shareholder rights that legally cannot be ignored by the Celsius board.”

BnkToTheFuture said that after submitting their proposals to Celsius and its advisors, it was now looking to "apply pressure" on the firm after getting "worried that time was running out" with its lack of a clear plan of action. These views were also mentioned by Dixon in a Digital Assets News interview on the same day:

“You have to move really fast, because the longer you go on, the more FUD comes out, bad PR comes out, more predatory offers come out, the more the community stops believing in what they originally believed in.”

Users of Celsius have been unable to withdraw assets from the platform since June 13 due to the firm's ongoing liquidity issues. If the company were to go bankrupt, there is a fear that users may never get their funds back.

The Celsius solution may exist

In a blog post from July 1, Celsius said that it is doing everything in its power to fix its liquidity issues so that it can "share more information with the community."

The company did not provide much information about what this means, but it said that it is investigating ways to safeguard its assets, such as seeking strategic transactions and restructuring of its liabilities, among other options.

"These exhaustive explorations are complex and take time," the blog post said, "but we want the community to know that our teams are working with experts from many different disciplines."

FTX abandoned the Celsius deal when it realized that the financials were bad

Reports that Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX had abandoned a deal to buy Celsius after discovering the company's finances had a $2 billion shortfall surfaced on June 30.

Two unnamed sources close to the matter revealed that FTX had held talks with Celsius regarding either providing financial support or acquiring the firm outright. However, it was said that $2 billion in an account for Celsius would be difficult to deal with.