Introduction

On 12 June 2022, Celsius announced a pause on all activity. According to their announcement on Medium, this was related to their ability to meet obligations. Hit by the Terra collapse of UST and LUNC in May 2022, followed by the stETH price decrease and liquidity crunch in June, Celsius appears to be in a solvency crisis and has been reportedly offloading their holdings to garner liquidity.

On crypto twitter, users have been active in trying to identify Celsius wallets and transactions in an attempt to gain more transparency on the company's state and possible developments of the current situation.

Methodology

In Flipside Crypto data, these potential Celsius owned wallet addresses that users have gathered while seeking more transparency are marked as celsius addresses in the crosschain.address_labels schema and table. (This includes the 0x8aceab8167c80cb8b3de7fa6228b889bb1130ee8 wallet mentioned in the tweet above).

The goal of this analysis is to understand these likely Celsius wallets, in order to help users understand and interpret Celsius' recent moves. It will:

• enumerate the list of potential Celsius wallets from Flipside data,
• look at incoming vs. outgoing transactions and dollar amounts moved over time,
• find token balances and compositions for these wallets, both what they currently hold and how the holdings have changed leading up to now.

Data Results

The full list of presumably Celsius-owned wallets in Flipside data contains 66 addresses:

Historically, the wallets have had many more transactions going in than out. However, by USD volume, outgoing transactions rivaled and even exceeded incoming amounts.

Notably, there was a spike in transaction movements during the Terra crash starting on around 11 May 2022. The numbers for June (during the stETH liquidity squeeze) have also been high already, on par with previous months before May, even though June is only at the halfway mark:

While the previous two charts show many incoming transactions and large incoming total amounts per day, the monthly average transaction size (chart below) is illuminating. Incoming transactions to Celsius wallets have, on average, been much smaller every month, compared to an average outgoing transaction.

The size of average transactions in both directions spiked in May and June 2022, but most notably, average outgoing transactions more than doubled in size compared to April:

Among the top held tokens in Celsius wallets on the day of the analysis (by USD equivalent amount), the leaders are wrapped BTC and ETH, stablecoins, regular ETH, MATIC, and the CEL native governance token:

The following chart explores dynamic changes in token balances (in USD equivalent) on a daily basis for all of the identified Celsius wallets collectively. The May to June 'dump' of most tokens is evident. USDC is the only exception, likely seen by Celsius, as by everyone else, to be the liquid and peg- and price-stable safe haven for liquidity on the blockchain:

Takeaways

With a heightened activity of both incoming and outgoing transactions that have grown in size, May and June 2022 saw an unmistakable outflow of balances from wallets that are reportedly owned by Celsius. As Celsius scrambles to reclaim liquidity in order to at least partially bolster its solvency, this analysis is intended to be informative to the crypto community, although not as financial advice.

About

This analysis was created by catscatscode (Flipside, Twitter, catscatscode#3578 on Discord) on 15 June 2022 for Flipside Crypto's "New Celsius Wallets" Celsius flash bounty. This analysis represents the best effort at interpreting available data, but it is not financial advice.