Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius used QuickBooks to log its finances just like FTX. The company went bust last July as the cryptocurrency market underwent a huge sell-off. According to an examiner’s report, Celsius’ tracked its finances in 15 QuickBooks files and failed to produce consolidated statements. Loading Something is loading.
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Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius used QuickBooks to log its finances – just like FTX.
That made it challenging to analyse the company’s transactions after it went bust, given Quickbooks is “geared mainly toward small and medium-sized businesses,” said court-appointed examiner Shoba Pillay on Tuesday, per Decrypt.
QuickBooks is an accounting tool for small and medium-sized businesses, but not ones with billions of dollars in revenue or assets under management, like FTX or Celsius. The tool came under the spotlight after FTX imploded, as its new CEO John Ray III revealed that the crypto exchange used it to run its multibillion-dollar business.
According to Pillay, Celsius’ tracked its finances in 15 QuickBooks files and failed to produce consolidated statements. Later, Pillay found “significant discrepancies” between account balances in Celsius’ QuickBooks files and those used to create consolidated statements, per Decrypt.
The court examiner found the “files produced by Celsius were not the original files used to prepare the consolidated financial statements.”
“Celsius retroactively prepared consolidation files from its historical accounting records,” the examiner’s report alleges.
Celsius filed for bankruptcy last July, after it froze customer withdrawals on its platform a month earlier as the so-called “crypto winter” hit the digital-asset industry. Before it collapsed, Celsius managed $11 billion worth of assets and had around 1.7 million users.
A detailed probe into the troubled crypto lender found that Celsius misled customers when it advertised its business model. Its downfall mirrors other high-profile crypto collapses like FTX and Genesis in recent months, putting investor confidence on shaky ground.
Celsius did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.