What happened, and when
Across 2022, the crypto lending sector lost more than $10 billion in customer assets as Celsius, BlockFi, Genesis, Voyager and Hodlnaut all froze withdrawals and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
These were not fringe operations. They advertised heavily, paid referral bonuses, offered double-digit yields, and were recommended across the same comparison sites that now promote whoever replaced them. Several appear in keyword data to this day, with people still searching for their promo codes.
That is the reason this page exists. If you search for a Celsius promo code today, most of what ranks is either an abandoned page or an affiliate site that never updated. Nobody tells you the company is gone.
None of these platforms is accepting new customers
Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager and Genesis are wound down or in wind-down. Any page offering you a bonus to join one is describing something that does not exist, and any site contacting you about recovering funds from them should be treated as a recovery scam until proven otherwise.
What customers got back
The outcomes varied enormously, which is itself the most useful thing to understand. "Bankruptcy" did not mean one predictable result.
BlockFi achieved 100% recovery on allowed claims. Its Plan Administrator monetised FTX bankruptcy claims at a premium that significantly exceeded initial creditor expectations. That was an excellent result and it depended substantially on how the FTX estate happened to resolve — not on anything a BlockFi customer did.
Celsius has run three distribution rounds totalling over $2.87 billion, bringing cumulative creditor recovery to around 64.9%, with a final target range reported at 67% to 85% of allowed claims. Its plan, confirmed in November 2023, spun off the mining business to a new entity owned by customers and wound down the rest.
Voyager Digital and Genesis Global were wound down entirely. After a planned sale of Voyager to FTX collapsed, a Chapter 11 plan was confirmed including the sale of customer accounts to Binance US.
So the range ran from full repayment to a substantial haircut, resolved over years rather than months. Even the best outcome meant customers were without their assets for a long time while a court process ran.
What happened to bonuses
This is the part directly relevant to the rest of this site, and it is a point we make on nearly every promotions page.
A promotional balance is an unsecured claim like any other. In a bankruptcy it does not rank ahead of anything. Where recovery is partial, a bonus is reduced by the same percentage as the money you deposited yourself.
Locked and unvested bonuses fared worst. A reward subject to a holding period, a trading volume condition or a staking commitment is a conditional claim, and conditional claims are the messiest category in an insolvency. Plenty of people had balances visible on a dashboard that were never going to become money.
Which is the practical basis for the rule we repeat across this site: treat any bonus as unearned until it has been successfully withdrawn once. Not when it appears as a balance, not when the terms say it has vested. When it has left the platform.
It applies equally to locked CRO rewards, multi-year matched deposits and the non-withdrawable trading credit that makes up most offshore welcome bundles.
Why it happened all at once
These were not five independent failures that coincided. They shared a cause.
Three Arrows Capital, a hedge fund, collapsed in mid-2022 and triggered a chain reaction, because Voyager, Celsius, FTX, BlockFi and Genesis all had significant lending exposure to it. One counterparty failing took down a sector.
The lesson is not that crypto prices fell. Prices had fallen before without this happening. The lesson is concentrated counterparty risk that customers could not see. Depositors at these firms believed they were spread across several independent platforms. In substance they were exposed to the same borrower through five different front doors.
There was no way to discover this from the outside. The yields were advertised; the lending book was not. That asymmetry is the genuinely important part of the story, and it has not been legislated away.
What it teaches
Four things we would carry forward, all of which shape how this site treats promotions.
A yield is a risk premium. Rates well above what regulated products pay are compensation for risk somebody decided you would not ask about. That applies to lending yields and to enormous advertised bonuses alike.
A balance on a screen is a claim. Not money, and not yours in any sense that survives an insolvency. This is why we weight withdrawability so heavily across every promotions page here.
Keep records off the platform. The hardest crypto tax cases we hear about involve reconstructing years of history from an exchange that no longer exists. Export your transaction history periodically — our tax software page covers connecting tools while the accounts still work.
Self-custody removes this entire category of risk. Assets on a hardware wallet were not part of anybody's bankruptcy. That is the argument for a hardware wallet in one sentence, and it is stronger than any feature comparison.
Why we wrote this rather than a promo page
There is real search demand for promo codes at two of these companies. We could rank for it with a page listing codes, and it would be traffic we did not have to earn.
It would also be sending people toward companies in liquidation. The honest version of that page is this one: the platform is gone, here is what its customers actually recovered, and here is what it should change about how you read the next advertised bonus.