Before the market downturn, lending was big business for the crypto industry. Celsius, sometimes called a “neobank,” accrued over $11 billion assets on its platform. BlockFi, which recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, had been valued at $3 billion just last year. Genesis, a Wall Street-facing firm owned by CoinDesk’s parent company, Digital Currency Group, had $2.8 billion in active loans at the end of the third quarter of this year (down from $11.1 billion the same quarter a year earlier).
