The troubled crypto lender Celsius has closed its last remaining loan from a DeFi protocol after previously paying off loans on Aave and Maker loan.Read MoreFeedzy
Celsius Network, the embattled crypto lender that is facing liquidity troubles, fully paid off its remaining debt to the decentralized finance (DeFi) lending protocol Compound, freeing up nearly $200 million of pledged collateral.
Data on the blockchain transaction tracer Etherscan shows that a wallet linked to Celsius transferred 50 million DAI tokens – MakerDAO’s dollar-pegged stablecoin – to Compound in two instances. After the down payments, Compound released 6,900, then 3,100 wBTC tokens to Celsius that had been locked up on the protocol as collateral.
The maneuver followed a similar treasury-management tactic that Celsius used recently to fully pay off and close its loans from the DeFi lending protocols Aave and Maker. The loans on these protocols are overcollateralized, meaning the borrower has to lock up more digital assets in value than the loan’s value.
Paying off overcollateralized loans is theoretically a net positive for Celsius’s liquidity because the move unlocks more assets in value than what is needed to pay down the loans.
However, Celsius has been making good on its debt to DeFi protocols. Since the start of July it has paid back $223 million to Maker, $235 million to Aave and $258 million to Compound.
As a result, it reclaimed more than a billion dollars worth of its crypto assets, mostly in wBTC and a type of ether (ETH) derivative token called stETH, which had been stuck on the protocols as collateral.
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