Apollo Global Management Reportedly Participating in Bid for Celsius

Asset manager Apollo Global Management is reportedly participating in one of the bids for Celsius.

The firm is one of the investors in a bid for the bankrupt cryptocurrency lender submitted by NovaWulf, CoinDesk reported Monday (May 8), citing an unnamed source.

Reached by PYMNTS, an Apollo spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Celsius said in an April 29 post on Twitter that NovaWulf was one of three firms involved in the bidding process, along with Fahrenheit and the Blockchain Investment Recovery Committee.

Should NovaWulf’s bid be picked as the winner, investors would receive a tiered management fee and an incentive fee, CoinDesk said, citing an investor deck that does not mention Apollo.

The report added that Apollo’s participation in the bid would be notable because traditional finance giants like Apollo have generally not looked to buy the assets of the players in the crypto industry that have gone bankrupt over the past year.

Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022, a month after it had frozen customer accounts.

The firm had become a big name in crypto lending by offering high returns while suggesting it was less risky than a regular bank, but got into trouble by offering big yields to crypto depositors while making big loans that were backed by insufficient collateral.

That left the company vulnerable to a market downturn, and the company said it froze withdrawals, swaps and transfers in June 2022 to prevent a run and losses to customers.

In January, a federal judge ruled that Celsius owns most of the customer deposits on its platform because “based on Celsius’s unambiguous Terms of Use … that when the cryptocurrency assets were deposited in Earn Accounts, the cryptocurrency assets became Celsius’s property.”

That decision impacted 600,000 account holders who had $4.2 billion in assets held with Celsius at the time the company sought bankruptcy protection. The judge ruled that Celsius does not have the funds to repay those depositors in full.

In February, a bankruptcy court filing said some customers can withdraw funds from Celsius, assuming that the users meet specific criteria.