Celsius Paid Back Entire Loan to Maker, Reclaiming Nearly 22K BTC Collateral

After paying back an additional $41.2 million in Dai to decentralized lending platform Maker, Celsius Network now can reclaim approximately $450 million worth of BTC locked up as collateral on the protocol.

• Celsius has been actively paying back its loans to Maker in the past few days in a bid to drastically lower the liquidation price for its Bitcoin collateral.
• The centralized lending platform made its final push on Thursday, clearing up all the remaining $41.2 million loan to Maker, freeing up a total of  21,962 wrapped BTC, according to on-chain data provided by Defiexplore.com.
• The wallet that belongs to Celsius also indicates that the lending platform has paid off additional loans to other decentralized lending platforms such as Aave and Compound during the same period.
• As reported by CryptoPotato earlier, Celsius has slowly reduced its debt to the Maker protocol since earlier this month. It had paid back $224 million over the last seven days.
• The main objective of the loan repayments is to reclaim its locked-up collateral and ease the strained liquidity that had forced the beleaguered firm to halt withdrawals and transactions on June 12 to avoid a run on deposits.
• Fundstrat analyst Walter Teng reportedly stated that after the massive collateral gets released, Celsius is expected to sell the asset through OTCs or centralized exchanges in order to meet requirements from creditors and customers trying to withdraw their funds. As a result, this may cause a short-term downward pressure on the primary cryptocurrency.
• However, a Bloomberg report informed that a former employee has filed a lawsuit against the lender alleging market manipulation and fraud.