Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky talks crypto lending and why Bitcoin won’t be the “winning” blockchain

Serial founder of 8 NYC based companies, raised over $1B and had $3B in exists including 2 unicorns.

All roads lead to Decentralization, Celsius was created to enable people to Unbank themselves and deposit their money with someone who is acting in their best interest.

From the US or Europe, has at least $20k worth of Crypto and is a HODLer.

We have offices in London, New York, Tel Aviv and Belgrade. This is where we found the best people to build this project.

Celsius Network created the Interest income category for digital currencies. We pay up to 11% interest on 25 crypto assets by issuing loans and charging interest. We give our depositors 80% of what we make. We did over $4.25B in loans in less than two years and have 56,000 users worldwide.

Celsius is focused on bringing the next 100m users into crypto by paying them up to 8X more than banks do. Most of our competitors look and feel just like another bank. They do not share with depositors almost any of their income as it is all destined to their shareholders.

Yes, there are many risks the question is who do you trust to manage all these risks for you, you can do nothing and earn nothing, lend yourself and manage all the risk and keep 100% or outsource to Celsius and have 65 people work for you to manage risk and keep 80% of the income we generate on your coins.

We are really excited about our soon to be available ability to take dollar deposits around the world and enabling borrowers to borrow any digital asset against any deposit.

The biggest challenge is how you grow the community and how you continue to act in their best interests. Most services start with a good pitch but then add fees and change the mission to make more money. Celsius has never charged a single depositor any fees. We don’t plan to start either. Our other big challenge is making sure we take as little counterparty risk as possible, our job #1 is to return more coins to each depositor than they gave us.

I love Ethereum as a platform and love the DeFi services build on top of it. I also Like EOS as a Blockchain rails solution.

We have too many Blockchains and not enough users, too much volatility and not enough utility, in 2020 we will see the winners being separated from the losers in this industry.

Most of the solutions we provide today are not applicable or relevant to the 7.5B people on this planet. We need the Netscape moment and a killer app that looks and feels like apps we use today but runs on the blockchain rails everyone is working on. I can tell you that Interest Income on deposits is something 7.5B people do need and that is why we are focused on this as a killer DAPP.

Today the main function and value of Bitcoin comes from being the Store of value. Celsius enables users to earn a yield on top of BTC with small risk. We also enable stable coins pegged to six different FIAT currencies to earn up to 10% in interest income.

That the winning Blockchain is not BTC and that it has not yet been invented…

I believe Bitcoin will be one of the winners and definitely be a long-term store of value but it will not be the Blockchain that will get mass adoption of several billion people because of its legacy and speed issues. The winning blockchain will need to address the financial needs of 7B people on the planet. It will need to be fast and secure and win the trust of most of the world’s population.