The Crypto Winter: Key Takeaways

At Global Restructuring Review's inaugural "Restructuring in the Americas" conference, I joined Sean O'Neal of Cleary Gottlieb's moderated panel on key takeaways from the 2022–2023 crypto winter. At the time, I was serving as lead associate on all three of the largest U.S. crypto bankruptcies — Celsius, Genesis, and FTX — representing the Unsecured Creditors Committee and, in the FTX matter, a potential purchaser.

The panel addressed the novel legal questions that had only been resolved in real time during those cases: whether customer-deposited crypto is property of the estate or property of the customer (and how terms-of-use language determines the answer), how bankruptcy courts should value digital assets when market prices move hourly, what creditor committees should demand in disclosure statements, and how the Celsius "Earn" account treatment reshaped expectations for yield products. I also spoke to the intersection with regulatory work — many of the most consequential determinations in these cases were driven not by bankruptcy doctrine but by the SEC, CFTC, and state regulators asserting positions on classification and ownership in plan-confirmation briefing.