Creditors of Celsius Network LLC are seeking a subpoena against FTX to obtain information that may identify users involved in suspicious cryptocurrency trades that may have manipulated the price of Celsius’ native token last year.
The creditors’ committee said they want to subpoena FTX for information to identify users behind ten cryptocurrency wallets that they allege engaged in suspicious trades of Celsius’ CEL coin between April and August.
The committee said they retained blockchain consultant Elementus Inc., which identified 947 transactions over a three-day period “involving a near one-to-one relationship” between CEL token deposits and withdraws between the ten private crypto wallets and wallets on the FTX exchange.
The CEL trades in question occurred between the date Celsius paused customer withdrawals on June 12 and the company’s Chapter 11 filing on July 13, when the price of the token was 81 cents.
The company has valued the token at 20 cents in its proposed Chapter 11 plan, but a committee representing Celsius creditors alleges that suspicious trades of the token on FTX may have artificially inflated the price to 81 cents between June and July 2020.
FTX has not yet agreed to engage in informal discovery, and the bankruptcy case is being heard in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.