Is FTX’s CEO Affected By The Celsius Bankruptcy?
- The biggest creditor listed in the Celsius bankruptcy filing is Pharos USD Fund SP
- Celsius’s Chapter 11 filing shows that it owes Pharos $81 million
After the filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy by Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency lending platform, the list of creditors continues to increase. Interestingly, the biggest creditor for the firm is Pharos USD Fund SP, and it owes it a significant sum of $81 million.
According to a report from Bloomberg, the amount owed to Pharos is twice as large as that of the second-biggest creditor and the bankruptcy document lists a Cayman Islands address for Pharos, along with an email: [email protected].
The second-biggest creditor for Celsius is ICB Solutions, a digital agency dedicated to enhancing the reputation of brands, to whom the lending firm owes $13.3 million.
Furthermore, a Google search for Pharos USD Fund ISP yields no results but there is a job posting on the website of Lantern Ventures that describes Pharos as a London-based proprietary trading firm focused on cryptocurrencies.
The official LinkedIn page of Lantern Ventures hasn’t mentioned Pharos but there is an SEC filing that states Pharos as an affiliate of Lantern. The SEC filing shows that the firm has around $400 million under management, more than half of which comes from investors outside the US, the SEC filing confirms.
An interesting fact noted by Bloomberg is that Lantern also has several employees whose career histories listed on LinkedIn intersect with those of the founder and CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). Furthermore, the firm’s Chief Executive Officer Tara Mac Aulay is also the co-founder of Alameda Research, SBF’s crypto trading firm, she claimed in a November statement. Additionally, she has also worked at the Oxford, UK-based Centre for Effective Altruism, a charity where SBF was formerly a director of development.
Celsius owes Alameda $12.8 million, confirms the Chapter 11 filing and recently, SBF turned down a bailout request from the lending firm due to a huge hole in its balance sheet.
On the other hand, Bloomberg reached out to people at Alameda who confirmed that Mac Aulay was an early employee at Almeda adding that the firm has no ties with Lantern Ventures.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
