FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Linked to Celsius Bankruptcy Filing

Pharos USD Fund SP is the largest creditor of Celsius Network.
An SEC filing shows that Pharos is an affiliate of Lantern Ventures.
Tara Mac Aulay, CEO of Lantern, said she co-founded Alameda Research.

Crypto lending company Celsius Network, who filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday, has more than 100,000 creditors. Among these creditors, one named ‘Pharos USD Fund SP’ has been the highlight.

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According to Celsius’ Chapter 11 filing, the crypto lending firm owes $81 million to Pharos. Doubles the amount of claim the firm’s second-biggest creditor has.

An SEC filing from April shows that Pharos is an affiliate of Lantern Ventures, a London-based proprietary trading firm dealing mainly on cryptocurrencies. As per the SEC filing, Lantern was in control of around $400 million, more than half of which was owned by investors outside the US.

Some employees of Lantern were linked to Sam Bankman-Fried, a well-known crypto billionaire who’s also Celsius’ major creditor. One of them was Tara Mac Aulay, the CEO of Lantern Ventures, who’s also a co-founder of Bankman-Fried’s crypto firm Alameda Research, a crypto firm that Celsius also owes $12.8 million.

A spokesperson at Alameda confirmed to Bloomberg that Mac Aulay was employed there, yet pointed out that the firm now “has no relationship with Lantern Ventures.” According to her LinkedIn profile, she also served at a UK-based Centre for Effective Altruism charity at Oxford, where Bankman-Fried previously served as a director of development.

Mac Aulay was recorded as one of the biggest shareholders as per a Companies House filing. It shows that Lantern Ventures had a net worth of about $3.7 million as of May 2021.

A Lantern employee named Victor Xu also worked as a head trader at Alameda for nine months in 2018, as per his LinkedIn profile. There are at least three employees of Lantern Ventures shown in their LinkedIn profile that they worked for a charity of its affiliate linked to Bankman-Fried.

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Bryan Yanzon

Bryan is a gamer who became genuinely interested in crypto after his initial exposure to Play-to-Earn games like Axie Infinity and Pegaxy. He has basic knowledge of technical analysis and is keeping an eye out for interesting developments in the metaverse and GameFi space.