Celsius Customer Data Exposed Sparking Privacy Concerns
As Celsius continues to deal with the aftermath of its bankruptcy, the United States Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York disclosed data relating to thousands of the service’s customers, including names, amounts, types, descriptions, and timing of transactions on the platform.
It also indicated the United States dollar amounts and cryptocurrency type used.
In response to this act, some crypto community figures quickly took to Twitter to express concern over the court’s actions. For instance, the founder of Web3 startup Penumbra Labs Henry de Valence wrote that anyone can “now dox all the on-chain activity” of any Celsius user, by matching the dates and amounts to the corresponding blockchain transaction data.
He added that this instance is yet another reason why blockchain should be private.
According to the official documents, the platform’s executives also withdrew more than $17 million worth of crypto before freezing the platform-wide withdrawals.
Former CEO and co-founder Alex Mashinsky took around $10 million in May. The co-founder and former chief strategy officer Daniel Leon withdrew about $7 million while current chief technology officer Nuke Goldstein took close to $550,000.
In June, Celsius paused the withdrawals for its 1.7 million customers. It was later accused of a bizarre behavior due to its decision to pay crypto rewards without allowing the customers to withdraw the funds.
Already in July, Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky said that the bankruptcy filing is the right solution as it would bring stability to the business by fully transforming its structure. By then, the company had a $2.85 billion gap in its balance sheet.
In late August, the court granted the Celsius Network permission to continue mining and selling Bitcoin.
