Zac Prince11, chief executive officer of BlockFi, the US cryptocurrency lending platform facing rumors of a liquidity crisis, called on market commentators and media outlets on Monday after it announced earlier this month that it had signed a $680 million line of credit and acquisition option agreement with FTXUS.
It’s time to stop lumping BlockFi and discontinued projects like Voyager and Celsius in the same vein and emphasize that nothing is wrong with the platform.
In addition, there are investors concerned about the company’s exposure to gray Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), with its current discount of more than 30%, fear of a huge impact on BlockFi view.
Prince earlier clarified that BlockFi does not currently own GBTC directly and that the loans used as collateral are being wound down.
“BlockFi directly holds zero GBTC.
Bloomberg’s numbers are out of date.
We have several small loans (under $10 million) with GBTC as collateral that are winding down.”
Shortly after Prince’s clarification, CoinDesk reported that a BlockFi spokesperson said the company will no longer accept GBTC as collateral in the future;
“This is not to say that we will never accept GBTC as collateral in the future,” a spokesperson said a few hours after the announcement. “BlockFi will constantly evaluate the discount rate of collateral based on market conditions and will accept as many collateral as possible.”
At present, according to the page provided by the official website of BlockFi, the currencies that can be pledged are BTC, ETH, LTC and PAXG. Those who can use GBTC as collateral should be large institutional users, which has no impact on retail investors.
GBTC issued by Greyscale, whose application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to convert into a Bitcoin spot ETF was rejected at the end of June, representing the fastest chance to make GBTC discount disappear has failed, although Greyscale said that it has formally filed a lawsuit with the SEC,
But it is unclear when the lawsuit will end and whether the conversion will be successful.
Currently, according to YCharts, GBTC’s negative premium hit a record low of -34.08% in mid-June;
As of the 11th of this month, although there was a slight correction to -31.93%, but still at the lowest level in history.