Crypto Lender Genesis Files for Bankruptcy as FTX Contagion Spreads

Genesis, a crypto lending platform owned by enterprise capital agency Digital Foreign money Group, joined crypto agency BlockFi in submitting for chapter, the most recent crypto firm to go belly-up amid allegations of fraud after the collapse of FTX late final yr.

Genesis, the Newest to Fall

Genesis has been in dispute with crypto trade Gemini, based by the Winklevoss twins, which says it owes about $900 million to Gemini clients due to the lending product referred to as Earn. Earn program allowed Gemini customers to generate yields by lending their crypto property to a borrowing counterparty.

Genesis stated in its submitting with the U.S. Chapter Court docket for the Southern District of New York that it had each property and liabilities within the vary of $1 billion to $10 billion and stated it might need greater than 100,000 collectors.

The submitting consists of the mum or dad firm Genesis World Holdco and two of its lending enterprise subsidiaries, Genesis World Capital and Genesis Asia Pacific. The mum or dad firm has over US$150 million in money, which it plans to make use of to help its ongoing operations and restructuring course of.

DCG’s Different Investments

Digital Foreign money Group (DCG), the mum or dad firm of Genesis, has invested in crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken, together with the Circle, which runs the stablecoin USDC, and blockchain analytics firms Chainalysis, Dune Analytics, Elliptic, and Etherscan.

DCG subsidiaries additionally embrace on-line crypto information outlet CoinDesk, which this week stated it employed Lazard to discover a possible sale. CoinDesk broke the information that led to the collapse of FTX.

DCG additionally owns Grayscale Investments, whose Grayscale Bitcoin Belief (GBTC) is the world’s largest bitcoin fund. In November, DCG stated turmoil in Genesis’ lending operations had no influence on DCG, and its subsidiaries and Grayscale stated its underlying property weren’t affected.

The Backside Line

FTX’s implosion got here after bankruptcies at one other crypto lender and dealer, Voyager, centralized lending platform Celsius, and Three Arrows, suggesting that Genesis’ chapter is probably not the final for crypto companies.

Individually, digital asset agency Nexo Capital agreed to pay $45 million in penalties to federal and state regulators to settle allegations it broke securities guidelines by providing an unregistered crypto lending product. The Securities and Alternate Fee stated Nexo’s Earn Curiosity product was a safety that ought to have been registered as such with the company. The effective introduced Thursday is one other in a sequence assessed by the SEC and different securities regulators for crypto monetary merchandise.