“More than half a million people who deposited money with collapsed crypto lender Celsius Network have been dealt a major blow to their hopes of recovering their funds,” reports the Washington Post, “with the judge in the company’s bankruptcy case ruling that the money belongs to Celsius and not to the depositors.”
The judge, Martin Glenn, found that Celsius’s terms of use — the lengthy contracts that many websites publish but few consumers read — meant “the cryptocurrency assets became Celsius’s property.”
The ruling underscores the Wild West nature of the unregulated crypto industry. On Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James moved to impose a kind of order, or at least legal repercussions, on Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky, whom she accused in a lawsuit of defrauding hundreds of thousands of consumers…. And while Glenn’s ruling won’t affect FTX, whose terms of use were different, some analysts saw the ruling as