Historical replay · BTC/USD
The Celsius Freeze (June 2022)
On June 12, 2022, crypto lending platform Celsius abruptly suspended all withdrawals, deepening the deleveraging already underway after the previous month's Terra/Luna collapse and pushing Bitcoin to fresh cycle lows.
Celsius Network was one of the largest crypto "lending" platforms in the world, promising users high yields on crypto deposits, generated by lending those funds out to other market participants and deploying them across various strategies — some of which were directly exposed to the Terra ecosystem that had collapsed in May 2022.
On June 12, 2022, citing "extreme market conditions," Celsius abruptly suspended all withdrawals, swaps, and transfers between accounts, leaving hundreds of thousands of users without access to their funds. The news came as another major player, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, was facing similar trouble tied to heavily leveraged positions — a sign that the deleveraging triggered by Terra/Luna a month earlier was still propagating through the system.
Bitcoin, already weakened from the previous month, fell from around $28,000 to below $20,000 within a few days, then continued declining to a low near $17,500-$18,000 later that month — what turned out to be the bottom of the 2022 bear market. The episode highlights a risk often underestimated in crypto: entrusting funds to centralized lending platforms carries counterparty risk that's quite different from simply holding the asset directly.