Celsius Sues BitMEX for $495M Over 2020 Liquidations

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Summary

• Celsius’s litigation trust is suing five BitMEX-affiliated entities for $495 million.
• The claim covers 6,360.16 BTC liquidated during the March 2020 crash.
• The complaint arrived 11 days before BitMEX permanently shuts down.
• The case exposes leveraged positions Celsius once sold to users as low-risk.

The Celsius bankruptcy estate has filed a $495 million lawsuit against BitMEX, targeting five affiliated entities over Bitcoin liquidations that happened more than six years ago. The Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium, which administers what is left of Celsius after its 2022 collapse, submitted a 70-page complaint to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York on September 12, 2026. The timing is the sharpest detail in the whole filing, because BitMEX closes for good on September 23 and the trust has moved to lock in a claim before the offshore companies behind the exchange begin to dissolve.

The number rests on two separate losses from the March 2020 sell-off that traders still call Black Thursday. Celsius attributes 1,325.84 BTC to a direct liquidation on March 12, 2020, and a further 5,034.33 BTC to a loss it inherited from the JST Alpha 1 Fund on March 13, for a combined 6,360.16 BTC. The complaint refuses to treat the defendants as separate businesses. It groups HDR Global Trading Ltd., 100x Holdings Ltd. and three related companies as a single common enterprise, a framing that would let the trust pursue the whole structure rather than chase liability across corporate boundaries.

Celsius says the exchange’s own machinery deepened the crash

The mechanics of the complaint carry more weight than the headline number. Celsius does not merely argue that BitMEX liquidated losing positions during a violent drop. It argues the platform’s own systems widened those losses. The scale explains the stakes: on March 12, 2020, Bitcoin fell from roughly $7,200 to about $5,678 in some fifteen minutes, and BitMEX alone liquidated close to $702 million in positions that day, almost all of them longs. The trust points to delayed margin crediting, which it says stopped accounts from being topped up in time to survive the fall, and to artificial price collapses on the exchange’s internal order book that pushed liquidation prices below where Bitcoin was trading everywhere else.

A $20 billion lender that had only lawsuits left

Celsius ranked among the largest crypto lenders in the world before it failed, holding more than $20 billion in assets at its peak by offering depositors yields it branded as low-risk. The Terra-Luna implosion in mid-2022 drained liquidity across the sector and left the lender badly exposed. Celsius froze withdrawals in June 2022 and filed for Chapter 11 the following month, with a $5 billion hole in its balance sheet. It exited bankruptcy in late 2023, and by mid-2026 it had returned $3.47 billion of the $3.51 billion in eligible assets owed to creditors. The remainder passed to a litigation trust with a narrow mandate: sue former partners, exchanges and insiders, recover whatever it can, and use the proceeds to close the final creditor balances. The BitMEX suit is that mandate turned into a filing.

The filing undercuts Mashinsky’s “low-risk” sales pitch

There is an uncomfortable tension inside Celsius’s own case. Alex Mashinsky sold Celsius to retail users as a safe, delta-neutral operation, a strategy built to earn from fees and spreads without betting on the direction of Bitcoin. The complaint describes the opposite posture. To lose 6,360 BTC across a two-day crash, Celsius had to be carrying large leveraged long positions, the kind of exposure that only pays while the price keeps climbing. Court-appointed examiners already documented this after the bankruptcy, finding that management traded speculatively with pooled customer funds. By suing to recover those losses, the trust confirms how the firm built the exposure in the first place.

Eleven days to sue a company that is dissolving itself

No regulator is forcing BitMEX to close. Its board chose to. By July 2026 the exchange that invented the 100x perpetual swap back in 2014 had watched its market share slip below 0.01%, with daily volume down to roughly $400,000. HDR Global Trading looked for a buyer, found none, and moved to a phased wind-down. The trust’s deadline pressure flows straight from that calendar. Once the offshore entities enter formal dissolution, a creditor without a live claim already on file has almost nothing to attach, because no active company remains to answer a judgment.

For anyone still holding a balance on BitMEX, the lawsuit changes nothing about the September 23 deadline; withdrawals and the wind-down proceed on the exchange’s schedule regardless of how the Celsius claim moves through court.

What a courtroom win would actually recover

Surviving a motion to dismiss is a separate question from collecting a dollar. BitMEX has not answered the complaint publicly, and enforcing a U.S. bankruptcy judgment against dissolving offshore companies spread across the Seychelles, Hong Kong and Bermuda tends to be slow and uncertain even when the underlying claim is strong. Any recovery would feed the roughly $40 million still owed to Celsius creditors after the main distributions closed, a modest remainder against the size of the estate but the entire reason the trust still operates.

The filing also sets a marker for the trust’s other targets. BRIC has signaled it intends to pursue additional exchanges and counterparties tied to the 2020 and 2022 losses, and the BitMEX case is the first real test of how much a post-bankruptcy trust can claw back from a platform that is actively erasing itself. Whether the court accepts the common-enterprise theory will shape how aggressively the trust can move against the next name on its list.