“Geoff is a savvy and commercially astute professional” “He combines his keen intellect with a practical approach to deliver the best results for his clients”

Questions & Answers

Introduction for Insolvency & Restructuring Case Summaries 2021-2022 It gives us great pleasure to introduce our Insolvency & Restructuring Case Summaries 2021-2022.

This is the first year that we have published a collated version of the Case Summaries in addition to our regular insolvency InFocus updates. The Case Summaries have been produced in response to feedback that this would be a useful resource.

A crash in the cryptocurrency industry started this past spring, causing a significant number of cryptocurrency exchanges and related entities to seek bankruptcy protection, including the recent filing of one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX. The volatility in the industry continues, with the subsequent filing of the cryptocurrency firm BlockFi and the crypto-mining company Core Scientific.

Crypto Basics

Just weeks after the “implosion” of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, credit services provider BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 protection with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, indicating that it is burdened with billions of dollars of estimated liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors.

There has been no shortage of high-profile insolvencies in the crypto market in recent months across a range of market participants and geographies. These include the US Chapter 11 and Bahamas provisional liquidation of FTX as well as the US Chapter 11 filings of BlockFi, Singapore-based crypto hedge fund ThreeArrows Capital, US-based lenders Celsius Network and Voyager Digital, US-based crypto mining data centre Compute North and German crypto bank Nuri.

Summary of Key Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Amendments

Cryptoassets are traded on a global basis. Indeed, the markets are even more global and constant than markets in more conventional financial instruments, rivalled only perhaps by the FX markets in their reach.

Over the span of two weeks in July 2022, two of the largest retail-facing cryptocurrency platforms, Celsius and Voyager, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Bursting the Crypto Bubble and the Financial Turbulence Ahead With the FTX Group’s recent Chapter 11 filing, on the heels of the recent Celsius Network LLC Chapter 11 filing, we have entered what could be described as a “Lehman Brothers moment” for the crypto industry. This observation, together with the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and professors Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig for their pioneering research on banks and financial crises, has caused some of us to experience a déjà vu moment.

The landscape of digital assets, blockchain and related technologies is constantly evolving. Each quarter, Ropes & Gray attorneys analyze government enforcement and private litigation actions, rulings, settlements, and other key developments in this space. We distill the flood of industry headlines so that you can identify and manage risk more effectively.