Celsius Estate Sues BitMEX for 6,360 Bitcoin (BTC) Worth $495 Million

Celsius Estate Files $495M Claim Against BitMEX

The bankrupt estate of crypto lender Celsius Network has filed suit against five BitMEX entities, seeking the return of 6,360 Bitcoin worth roughly $495 million that disappeared during the March 2020 Covid crash. The complaint was lodged on September 12 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York by Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium, the litigation administrator appointed in the Celsius bankruptcy. Defendants include HDR Global Trading, ABS Global Trading, Shine Effort, 100x Holdings and HDR Global Services — corporate entities spanning Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, England, Hong Kong, the Seychelles and the United States. Nine counts cover fraud, price manipulation and replevin, the legal demand for return of the property itself rather than money damages. Celsius says its own loss was 1,325.84 BTC, wiped out in a single forced liquidation on March 12, 2020, while a further 5,034.33 BTC belonged to investment fund JST, whose claims were assigned to the estate in April 2025. Both were leveraged longs on the broader Bitcoin market — positions that paid out only if prices held firm. At Wednesday's levels near $75,702, the claim approaches half a billion dollars.

The March 2020 Liquidation Timeline

A liquidation force-closes a leveraged position once its collateral runs short, and both Celsius and its fund fell on the wrong side of one. Late on March 12, 2020, BitMEX closed Celsius's leveraged Bitcoin futures position, seizing 1,325.8385 BTC. The filing reconstructs a desperate margin battle: Celsius sent 350 BTC of additional collateral at 23:47 UTC, and BitMEX emailed five minutes later acknowledging the transfer while stating it had not yet confirmed it. The position had already been closed out by the time that confirmation landed. The second liquidation struck JST Alpha 1, a Cayman Islands fund Celsius had invested in, at 02:50 UTC on March 13, costing another 5,034.3281 BTC — a stack sized like a crypto whale's holdings. In that same minute, the complaint records, the contract's best offer price collapsed from $4,502 to $3,422, a move Celsius argues ordinary trading cannot rationally explain. The filing alleges BitMEX built its platform so its own liquidation machinery stripped customer collateral while the exchange's insurance fund grew from those same liquidations. The estate frames this as deliberate design, not market chaos.

BitMEX Stops Trading September 23

Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium is a venture of asset manager VanEck and GXD Labs, appointed in 2024 to recover Celsius assets for creditors — and it has form: the same team pulled a $299.5 million settlement from Tether out of the Celsius bankruptcy last October. BitMEX, meanwhile, is running out of road. The exchange said in July it would wind down, tying the decision to a strategic review rather than insolvency, a hack or regulator action, and it stops trading on September 23, force-closing all remaining positions at 04:00 UTC that day. The suit landed 11 days before that cutoff, and it is the second action filed against the exchange since the wind-down was announced. For a venue that long ranked among the best crypto exchanges for derivatives traders, the closure is abrupt. None of the allegations have been tested, and BitMEX has not responded. Alex Mashinsky, who led Celsius when the coins vanished, is serving 12 years for fraud and was permanently barred from regulated U.S. derivatives markets in June. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

Race Against the Wind-Down Clock

The suit also underlines the gap between Celsius's pitch and its book. The lender paid yield on deposits while marketing low-risk, delta-neutral strategies — arbitrage, funding-rate harvesting, carry trades — yet its July 2022 bankruptcy filings described several highly speculative derivative mechanisms, a finding the court-appointed examiner echoed. A leveraged long funded from a pooled customer book is exactly the position those documents described. The complaint, docketed in the Southern District of New York on September 12, states the allegations remain unproven, and our reading is that the estate's real leverage is the calendar: once BitMEX halts trading, a dissolving defendant becomes a far harder target.