BitMEX is facing another lawsuit just days before the end of its exchange business. Celsius Network’s bankruptcy estate has sued several BitMEX entities in a U.S. court, seeking the return of about 6,360 BTC liquidated during the March 2020 "Black Thursday" selloff, an amount valued at nearly $491 million at current prices.
Records from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York show that Celsius-related entities, acting through litigation manager Blockchain Recovery Investment Consortium (BRIC), filed the complaint on Sept. 12 against five BitMEX-linked companies: HDR Global Trading, ABS Global Trading, 100x Holdings, Shine Effort, and HDR Global Services.
BitMEX had already announced in July that it would wind down its exchange business and said all trading services will stop at 04:00 UTC on Sept. 23. That puts Celsius’s filing 11 days before the formal shutdown. BitMEX also delisted and settled major perpetual and futures contracts including XBTUSD and ETHUSD early on Sept. 16.
Celsius says two liquidation events caused losses of 6,360.1666 BTC
The complaint says that during the market crash on March 12, 2020, one Celsius leveraged position was forcibly liquidated on BitMEX, causing a loss of about 1,325.84 BTC. The next day, investment fund JST allegedly saw another 5,034.33 BTC liquidated.
JST later assigned the related claims to the Celsius bankruptcy estate, bringing the total amount in dispute to 6,360.1666 BTC. Based on CoinMarketCap’s Sept. 18 Bitcoin price of about $77,195, that amount is now worth roughly $491 million.
The dispute centers on whether BitMEX’s liquidation system amplified selling pressure
The core issue in the case is not simply that leveraged positions were liquidated. Celsius alleges that BitMEX controlled the price mechanism that triggered liquidation, the engine that executed it, and an insurance fund that received part of the liquidated assets, creating a conflict of interest.
The plaintiffs also claim that some liquidation sell orders were filled at prices more than 24% below the platform’s then second-best ask. They argue that large-scale automatic liquidations created extra selling pressure and pushed Bitcoin lower.
Between March 12 and March 13, 2020, Bitcoin fell from about $7,300 to about $3,900. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission later cited data from Coin Metrics and Skew showing that about $1.1 billion in BitMEX contracts were liquidated during that stretch. Research at the time had also treated auto-liquidation-driven selling as one factor that may have intensified the decline.
DDoS-related outage is also cited in the complaint
Another contested point in the filing is BitMEX’s service disruption at 02:16 UTC on March 13, 2020, when the exchange was hit by a DDoS attack. BitMEX said at the time that the incident delayed and in some cases prevented user requests, while attributing the interruption to the attack.
Celsius now cites that outage window as supporting evidence, arguing that selling pressure eased quickly once the liquidation engine paused, and saying this suggests BitMEX’s automatic liquidation system may have amplified the drop.
Those claims, however, are allegations in Celsius’s lawsuit and not facts established by the court at this stage. Whether BitMEX engaged in market manipulation, unlawful liquidation, or improper retention of client assets will be determined through later court proceedings.
A major legal fight as the exchange heads for closure
BitMEX has said the decision to close the exchange was not driven by financial difficulties, a hack, or immediate regulatory pressure, but by the board’s strategic review and decision to exit the market. Trading will end on Sept. 23, and any open positions still on the platform at that time will be forcibly settled by the system.
For Celsius creditors, the case could become another source of asset recovery. If the court eventually backs Celsius’s position, the dispute would not be limited to the value of Bitcoin at the time of the 2020 liquidations, when each coin was worth only several thousand dollars. The claim could instead focus on returning the Bitcoin itself, or calculating losses at current value.
What began as a leveraged liquidation dispute more than six years ago has now turned into a bankruptcy recovery case worth close to half a billion dollars because Bitcoin’s price is much higher today.
