Bitstamp Follows Other Exchanges in Canceling Orders for FTX and Celsius Tokens

By Will McCurdy

Bitstamp is set to disable new orders and cancel existing orders for all FTT and CEL trading pairs, it announced on Friday.

FTT is the proprietary exchange token of FTX, which offered customers small discounts on trades for holding FTT before the firm’s high-profile slide into bankruptcy last week. CEL offered users of the now defunct crypto lender Celsius a small increase in rewards on the platform before the lender shut down withdrawals in June.

The move comes after many other exchanges in the crypto world have already started prohibiting users from trading FTT: Binance removed the FTT/BTC, FTT/BNB, FTT/ETH and FTT/USDT trading pairs from its platform earlier this week, while BitMex delisted perpetual swap contracts linked to FTT (FTT/USD and FTT/USDT) at the end of last week. 

Most exchanges, with the exception of a few including Huobi and OKX, stopped CEL-related trading around three months ago following Celsius’s own bankruptcy in July. Coinbase does not list FTT for trading, but allows customers to hold FTT through Coinbase Wallet.

Withdrawals of FTT and CEL will remain enabled on Bitstamp after the deadline, but selling will be disabled on November 22 at 7 am EST. If you want to sell FTT/CEL on Bitstamp, you’ll have to do it before the deadline.

Though Celsius ceased operations in June after its slide into bankruptcy and controversial ongoing legal proceedings, and its CEL token lost all its practical utility, this hasn’t stopped traders from trying their luck with trading the token. 

CEL hit a post-collapse high of $3.86, according to data from CoinGecko, after falling to a low of $0.28 after the lender first announced it was halting withdrawals on June 12. 

The volatility may have been from a “short squeeze,” where an asset rapidly shoots up in price due to an excess of traders betting against it. The CEL trading action was briefly a hot point of discussion on the now infamous WallStreeBets Reddit communities. 

And while FTT token’s trading volume is vastly off its peak of $4.53 billion in a 24 hour period, or its long-term average, it’s still showing life for traders, showing volume of $17.28 million over the last 24 hours according to the latest CoinGecko data. That’s higher than the trading volume of many tokens with still-active use cases; for example, the cryptocurrency NEO has a 24-hour trading volume of just $15.38 million.

Bitstamp didn’t provide a specific reason for why it’s killing FTT/CEL at this time, but Decrypt has reached out for further comment.

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