Celsius Network LLC creditors want a bankruptcy judge to help them unmask FTX users they allege were involved in suspicious cryptocurrency trades that may have manipulated the price of Celsius’s native token last year, Bloomberg News reported. A committee representing Celsius creditors on Wednesday asked a bankruptcy judge for permission to subpoena FTX for information to identify users behind 10 cryptocurrency wallets they say engaged in a pattern of suspicious trades of Celsius’s so-called CEL coin between April and August. Celsius creditors said they need the FTX user information to determine whether the trading was legitimate “or instead a form of market manipulation, such as wash trading,” according to court papers filed yesterday. The committee said it 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 withdrawals among the 10 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, according to court documents.
