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Liquidators of bankrupt hedge fund Three Arrows Capital Ltd. said they will take steps to sell some of the firm’s nonfungible tokens as part of their recovery efforts, Bloomberg News reported. “The purpose of the sale is to realize the value of the NFTs for the purposes of the liquidation,” Christopher Farmer, senior managing director at advisory firm Teneo wrote in a notice on Wednesday. The steps will commence after March 23, the notice said. The document did not provide details of the NFTs up for sale, but clarified that these do not include the popular “Starry Night” Portfolio. The latter is an NFT-focused fund that was started by Three Arrows co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies during the crypto craze in 2021. Three Arrows collapsed last year after a series of mistimed bets and soured crypto prices triggered margin calls. It previously managed around $4 billion in assets. Its founders have since been sparring with the court-appointed liquidators charged in June with unwinding their assets. The liquidators have alleged lack of cooperation from the founders and recently subpoenaed them via their Twitter handles.

Shares of Cineworld slumped as much as 22% on Wednesday after media reports said the world's second-largest cinema operator had received 40 non-binding bids, but none for its UK and U.S. assets or nearing its $6 billion secured debt load, Reuters reported. The reports cited company counsel Joshua Sussberg's comments to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston on Tuesday, where he also said the initial bids received by a Feb. 16 deadline were all for the rest of Cineworld's global assets, mainly for theatres in central Europe, eastern Europe and Israel. In January, the company said that it would focus on a sale of the group as a whole rather than individual assets, months after the British cinema operator filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in its bid to restructure debt and strengthen its balance sheet. The reports also said the company was proposing an April 10 deadline for final bids, with an auction, if necessary, to follow on April 17. A vote on restructuring has been set for May 21, with a court confirmation hearing tentatively set for May 30.

Debtors of bankrupt crypto lender Celsius Network have presented a sale plan to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York, Coindesk.com reported. The plan is as part of the overall reorganization plan for Celsius' retail platform and mining business and has the support of the official committee of unsecured creditors. At the center of the plan is an in-principle agreement with NovaWulf Digital Management, a digital asset investment firm, making it the plan sponsor. The debtors chose NovaWulf as it "provides the best method to distribute the debtors’ liquid crypto assets and maximize the value of the Debtors’ illiquid assets through a new company run by experienced asset managers," the filing said. The plan is the product of the debtors’ court-approved sales process which Celsius Network lawyers had outlined in January 2023. They had said that the bankrupt crypto lender is planning to reinvent itself as a new, publicly traded “recovery corporation” in order to exit the bankruptcy process. The "comprehensive" sale process involved debtors’ advisors contacting over 130 parties and executing non-disclosure agreements with 40 potential bidders. This was whittled down to six bids for the retail platform, and three bids for the mining operation. The next step will be to finalize a binding agreement to designate NovaWulf as the successful bidder. According to the plan, NovaWulf will make a direct cash contribution of $45 million to $55 million to NewCo, a term used a describe a corporate spin-off before it is assigned a final name. Read more.

Pet-care retailer Independent Pet Partners Holdings LLC filed for bankruptcy, seeking to sell some of its stores to its top lenders, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Woodbury, Minn.-based company filed for chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., on Sunday, blaming a sudden change in consumers’ pet food preference and the COVID-19 pandemic for lost revenue. Founded in 2017, the company has expanded its footprint by acquiring regional pet-store chains. The portfolio spans about 160 stores in a dozen states across the nation, under the banners Chuck & Don’s, Kriser’s Natural Pet, Natural Pawz and Loyal Companion, according to court papers. The company generated about $220 million in net sales in 2022. As of the petition date, it had about $182 million in assets and about $215 million in liabilities, according to the filing. It recorded about $111.4 million in secured debt. The company said its focus on grain-free, high-protein dog food caused it to lose about $10 million in sales in the second half of 2019 because pet owners stopped buying that type of product after reading reports that the food could cause dilated cardiomyopathy, a potentially fatal heart disease in dogs, according to the declaration filing by Stephen Coulombe, co-chief restructuring officer of the company. The filing said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration hasn’t established a causal relationship between grain-free diets and the disease.

New York Digital Investment Group, one of the largest crypto lenders, is repossessing 27,403 machines from bankrupt miner Core Scientific Inc. as the company seeks to extinguish a loan, Bloomberg News reported. The mining company received a court approval to ship those machines to NYDIG in the coming months, eliminating a $38.6 million machine-backed loan. The collateral is worth about $25 million at the current market price, according to a Feb. 2 filing. NYDIG is one of the largest underwriters for loans backed by mining machines. It originated about $378 million in such loans to miners between October 2020 and May 2022, according to data compiled by TheMinerMag. The lender has received tens of thousands of machines as miners struggle to repay the loans. The lender received 26,200 machines from Stronghold Digital Mining Inc. to eliminate the miner’s $67 million debt and it is likely to take over another batch of machines from Iris Energy as the miner defaulted on $103 million machine-backed loans. The lender is on track to be a major miner as it repossesses Bitcoin mining facilities along with machines. NYDIG agreed to pay Greenidge Generation Holdings not only for its mining machines, but to operate them in exchange for debt reduction. The deal effectively made Greenidge, once the largest miner in the US, a hosting firm to run the lender’s machines.

H2 Brands Group, a wholesaler of home and hardware products including fans, humidifiers and paint supplies, said it has filed for bankruptcy due to supply-chain problems, vendor lawsuits and potential liabilities from a deadly 2022 fire in New York City, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Cranbury, N.J.-based company, which counts Target Corp., Dollar General Corp. and Family Dollar Stores Inc. among its customers, has total debt of roughly $100 million and plans to sell its assets in chapter 11. Its revenue fell to $256 million last year from $325 million in 2021, according to a document filed Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. Supply-chain problems have played a role in the company’s financial problems, Chief Executive Mark Rostagno said in a sworn declaration. The amount of time needed to receive products from China has increased more than fourfold to 150 days during the pandemic, H2 Brands said. In response, the company said it placed bigger orders so it wouldn’t be caught short of inventory, increasing its financial obligations. H2 Brands said the cost of ocean containers has risen to an average of $8,800, up from roughly $2,500 before the supply-chain disruptions. The company said it also faces claims related to a fire in a Bronx apartment building that killed 17 people last year, one of the deadliest blazes in New York City in decades. Fire investigators said a space heater distributed by the company was a factor in the fire. H2 Brands has disputed the claims.