On March 12, 2020, bitcoin lost half its value in a single day — the crash traders still call "Black Thursday." Six and a half years later, that day is back in court.
Celsius Network's bankruptcy estate, acting through its litigation administrator Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium, has sued five BitMEX-linked entities — HDR Global Trading, ABS Global Trading, Shine Effort, 100x Holdings and HDR Global Services. The complaint landed September 12 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The ask: 6,360 BTC, worth roughly $495 million today.
The claim covers two forced liquidations from that week in 2020: BitMEX wiped out 1,325.84 BTC belonging to Celsius itself on March 12, then another 5,034.33 BTC from investment fund JST a day later — a claim later assigned to the estate. Both were leveraged long bets on bitcoin, and both were wiped out within hours.
Celsius's lawyers argue BitMEX built its liquidation engine to work against its own customers: the exchange ran both the engine that triggered forced sales and the insurance fund that profited from them. The suit points to liquidation prices running 24% below other exchanges, and to an outage on March 13 that coincided almost exactly with liquidations stopping and bitcoin's price snapping back. BitMEX blamed that outage on a DDoS attack at the time.
BitMEX has previously dismissed similar 2020-era claims as "opportunistic" and vowed to fight them in court. The trouble is there may be little exchange left to fight with — BitMEX announced its wind-down in July and stops trading entirely on September 23, just eleven days after this suit was filed. Whether a shuttering platform has the money, or the will, to cover a half-billion-dollar claim is now a question for a judge, not the market.
