By Ingrid Bagby, Michele Maman, Anthony Greene, and Marc Veilleux (Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft LLP)
Note: This post is the second post in a series of posts on bankruptcies of cryptocurrency companies and the emerging issues they pose. The first post can be read here (by Megan McDermott).
This series is being managed by the Bankruptcy Roundtable and Xiao Ma, SJD at Harvard Law School, xma [at] sjd [dot] law [dot] harvard [dot] edu.
Check the HLS Bankruptcy Roundtable periodically for additional contributing posts by academics and practitioners from institutions across the country.
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Crypto-watchers and bankruptcy lawyers alike have speculated how customer claims based on digital assets such as cryptocurrencies should be valued and measured under bankruptcy law. However, a crypto-centric approach to valuing claims raises a number of issues. For example, measuring customer claims in cryptocurrency and making “in-kind” distributions of these assets could lead to creditors within the same class receiving recoveries of disparate USD value due to fluctuation in cryptocurrency prices. Moreover, the administrative burden associated with maintaining, accounting for, and distributing a wide variety of cryptocurrencies as part of a recovery scheme or plan may prove costly and complex. Equity holders also might challenge the confirmability of a plan where valuations and recoveries are based on cryptocurrency rather than USD, as a dramatic rise in cryptocurrency values may allow for a return of value to equity.
A recent dispute in the Celsius bankruptcy proceedings as to whether a debtor is required to schedule claims in USD, or whether cryptocurrency claims can be scheduled “in-kind,” may serve as a preview of things to come on these issues. In Celsius, each Debtor’s schedule of unsecured creditors’ claims (Schedule E/F) listed customer claims by the number of various forms of cryptocurrency coins and account types, rather than in USD. Subsequently, a group of Celsius preferred shareholders filed a motion directing the Debtors to amend their Schedules to reflect customer claims valued in USD, in addition to cryptocurrency coin counts.
Ultimately, the Debtors and the Series B Preferred Holders were able to consensually resolve the motion by the Debtors agreeing to amend their schedules by filing a conversion table reflecting the Debtors’ view of the rate of conversion of all cryptocurrencies listed in the Debtors’ schedules to USD as of the petition date. However, it remains to be seen whether scheduling of claims in cryptocurrency and providing conversion tables will become the norm in similar cases involving primarily crypto-assets. Practitioners and creditors should expect further issues to arise in the claims resolution process in crypto-related cases as claimants and liquidation trustees (or plan administrators) wrestle with how to value claims based on such a volatile asset, subject to ever-increasing regulatory scrutiny. For now, the bankruptcy process continues to run on USD.
The full article can be read here, and the memo is also republished by National Law Review, Lexology and Mondaq.