Celsius Customers should have read user terms - $4.2 billion gone as a result!

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I saw an article this afternoon containing a court ruling regarding customer funds deposited with Celsius. If you do not know already or have forgotten, Celsius is a crypto lending platform that promised customers up to 20% ROI. The company filed for Bankruptcy many months ago, even before the FTX collapse. Customers have been fighting hard with the courts to try and recover their crypto assets valued at $4.2 billion.

Now a judge has ruled that the terms and conditions which Celsius customers read (presumably) and agreed with, stipulated that any funds they deposit in their accounts no longer belongs to them. By depositing their crypto assets with the platform, they in essence have agreed to hand over its ownership to Celsius.

Now this simple line or two of the terms is being used to let the customers know that Celsius is not owing them in this bankruptcy filing. This is actually shocking assuming the court ruling stands this way. More than 600,000 customers will not have the right to ask for their money - $4.2 billion in total - because they agreed to give up ownership of their crypto assets once they deposit it in their Celsius user accounts. Shocking, shocking, shocking to say the least.

The question is why do we (customers) quickly click "agree" without reading or understanding the terms document?

I have made this mistake too, and this particular Celsius court ruling is a lesson for me and everyone. Personally, I simply click agree and move on because of the following reasons:

• The terms document is always too long: This is the first and most common excuse. Its usually a long document - sometimes running into many pages. In this time of short attention span, it seems that no one has the time or patience to read such a 'long' document when you can actually click "agree" without any immediate risks or damages.

So in order to save time, in order to prove that we are lazy sometimes, we simply agree without learning about the agreement terms and meaning. As I have seen with the Celsius bankruptcy situation, this is a terrible mistake I should not make henceforth.

Below is another reason most users do not read the terms document.

• The terms document is difficult to understand: I have personally found many terms documents difficult to understand - that is the few I tried to read at all. I learnt that most times, this document is prepared by a legal team. So they may use a language or some expressions that are difficult to understand.
  Also, some documents are consciously prepared so that the user will not see some hidden clauses or phrases that carry the weight of the agreement. So the easy way out would be to just agree and click.

Well, its better to take your time to read and understand the document. Otherwise you will be signing your own death warrant - your financial grave. It would be better to ask a friend who knows better to try and explain some difficult parts of the document. Or better yet, I can mail the team and ask for explanations of any part of the document I do not get clearly. This way, I will be able to get everything clearly in order to take a decision to sign the document or not.

• The terms document is not important after all: Right now, I understand how important a terms and conditions document is. But before now, it has not always been like that. I used to feel that this document is not too important after all. Am excited to use a new service and the fun of trying something new should not be delayed or spoiled by a long document placed at the bottom.

Many users like me do not appreciate the weight terms documents carry. And who even thinks that disagreements or other problems - like bankruptcy in the case of Celsius - will arise from the use of a nice service or product? But as 2022 has rightly thought us, a lot of things could and do go wrong. Bankruptcy and other situations could develop that will make it necessary to look into the terms document. If you have signed it without reading or understanding what is inside, claims of ignorance will not be accepted from you in the future.

Final thoughts

My heart goes out to all the Celsius customers out there! But then, the terms document is worth all your time and effort. It is one of the most important aspect of customer relations with the service provider. We have seen lots of crypto project collapse and many issues that arose in 2022. We should learn from other peoples mistake, shouldn't we? Why not read what you are signing so that you wont be another statistic in the nearest future.

OR

Its even better to just ditch all web2 and centralized projects. They make lots of unreal offers. They are smart to hide a lot in the terms document - they know you wont read it anyway. They are smart. So we can outsmart them by sticking to web3 projects. Leo Finance has so many projects in one place for you. Just explore and there is something for everyone.

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