Crypto Winter Means Hard Work for Bankruptcy Lawyers

Bankruptcy law is the ultimate countercyclical industry: business is booming when when things get bad. And things have almost never been worse in the crypto world, with even the most prominent coins down more than 40% in just the past year.

Numerous crypto platforms—Voyager Digital, Celsius, BlockFi, and, most famously, FTX—have filed for Chapter 11. That means bankruptcy attorneys have a lot of work on their plates.

Bloomberg Law spoke to more than half a dozen of the attorneys working on these cases to hear if managing a crypto bankruptcy is just another day at the office. They say nothing in their careers prepared them to unwind what were essentially quasi-banks dealing with some of the most volatile financial assets known to humankind.

"I knew that they would present novel issues of law and technology," White & Case lawyer Greg Pesce, who's working on the Celsius bankruptcy, told us. "And that couldn't begin to describe what we confronted."

On this special episode of our weekly podcast, On The Merits, we hear what it's like to be an attorney managing the downfall of the titans of crypto.

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