Key facts:
With this payment, Celsius closes the collateralized loan that it held in MakerDAO.
Celsius also has debts to pay on other DeFi platforms.
The cryptocurrency investment company Celsius, which had its clients in suspense, finished paying off its debt to the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol MakerDAO and thus withdrawing the bitcoins it had deposited as collateral.
This Thursday, July 7, Celsius made a final payment for $41.2 million in the stablecoin DAIas can be seen on the website of MakerDAO which keeps a record of the transaction.
With this payment, Celsius finally withdrew 21,962 WBTC (wrapped bitcoin, a token that maintains parity with bitcoin and is used in various DeFi protocols on the Ethereum network) that were at risk of being liquidated amid the consequent drop in the price of the cryptocurrency.
This represents not only an achievement for the company, but also gives an air of calm to the cryptocurrency market as a whole. Not only because of the potential fall of a renowned company in the niche, but because what was at risk was money from its users.
In days past, Celsius had made important payments to pay off the debt. For example, the more than 100 million in DAI that he deposited at the beginning of the week and that we reported in CriptoNoticias.
Risking your clients’ capital
Celsius, an investment platform, had used the BTC deposited by its users to borrow on various DeFi protocols. In this type of operation, whoever requests the loan receives stablecoins such as DAI and must leave another currency as collateral. In this case, the bitcoins of Celsius customers.
If the price of bitcoin continued to fall, the value of the BTC deposited by Celsius risked being insufficient to continue collateralizing the loan. Hence the possibility of a liquidation, which implies that the house (in this case MakerDAO) would keep the collateral.
Despite having managed to close this chapter on MakerDAO, Celsius also has outstanding loans on protocols like Aave and Compound. The company has made payments to both platforms in the last few hours as well, as can be seen by analyzing one of your addresses through a blockchain browser.
While this is good news for Celsius customers, their funds are still locked on the platform. Withdrawals have been disabled since mid-June. In other words, the scare for its users has not yet passed.