In DeFi, it isn’t easy to understand who provides money for loans, where the money flows or how easy it is to trigger currency meltdowns. This is one reason regulators are concerned about the impact of DeFi on investors and the broader financial system.

Celsius said that its risk-management group recognized “shifts in the stability” of the platform that prompted it to remove its assets only for the sake of protecting its customers’ money. The company didn’t profit from the instability, it said.

Celsius accepts customers’ deposits and then lends that money out to other users, like exchanges and market makers. It collects a fee for the service and then passes on that revenue to its users as an interest payment. Celsius offers users yields of up to about 14%, so Anchor’s 19.5% yield was attractive to the firm.

It wasn’t clear to investors that their money in a Celsius account might have been invested in the Anchor platform. Celsius, Voyager and others in the industry don’t usually disclose their counterparties.