The FTX Contagion Goes on: Midas Investments Closes Down

The cryptocurrency platform Midas Investments disabled deposits and swaps due to severe financial losses caused by Celsius’ bankruptcy and FTX’s fiasco.

CEO Iakov Levin said the organization will aim to focus on a new project next year that will be “fully transparent” and will offer an “improved investment experience.”

Another Victim

In a recent blog post, Midas Investments’ Founder and CEO said the company shut down services on its platform yesterday (December 27). It disabled customer withdrawals for a few hours to conduct necessary calculations and later allowed users to withdraw their remaining funds with adjusted deductions.

Levin revealed that the entity’s initial goal was to deduct 48% from clients’ balances but later changed the figure to 55%:

“We will adjust user balances by balancing remaining liabilities in BTC, ETH, and stablecoins with remaining assets, deducting 55% and rewards earned.”

Balances in other digital currencies, including BNB, AVAX, and FTM, will not be impacted. The company will also distribute MIDAS tokens as compensation to affected customers based on their deducted amount.

Levin believes retail and institutional clients will significantly increase their interest in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) in the next five years. As such, Midas Investments intends to roll out “scalable, on-chain, verifiable, tokenized CeDeFi strategies” for both CeFi and DeFi users. 

The company also aims to introduce a new project “built on principles of full transparency” that will have its own native token. The firm will eventually stop providing liquidity for the MIDAS token and swap it for the new asset.

The CEO apologized to all customers harmed by the platform’s closure. He raised hopes that the planned amendments will be the best solution to the current problems:

“This is not the end, but rather the beginning of something new. I understand the difficult decision to close Midas and apologize to anyone who lost money. I will do my best to make sure you can recoup your losses in the new project.”

What Caused the Issue?

Levin said the company lost around $50 million (20% of $250 million AUM) this spring, and users withdrew a large chunk of their holdings after the collapse of the former crypto giants Celsius and FTX. Midas Investments sought fundraising and other options to cope with the crisis but none of those managed to cease the downturn:

“Despite these efforts, the extensive withdrawals due to the insolvency of Celcius and FTX, coupled with reduced yield opportunities on the market, made it impossible for us to cover daily payouts to users due to the assets deficit.”

The FTX fiasco created a massive domino effect, negatively affecting the operations of numerous companies. The Japanese crypto platform Liquid Global and the cryptocurrency lender Genesis Global Capital suspended withdrawals, while BlockFi went further, filing for bankruptcy protection.

Big players in the financial world, such as BlackRock, Temasek, Tiger Global Management, Galois Capital, and others, lost millions due to investing in FTX.