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Celsius has become a hot CeFi platform for people to lend their crypto and earn interest, borrow, and perform other banking and investing activity.
The hugely popular “London Real” video and podcast program recently featured Celsius, while profiling how a younger generation of users is moving away from traditional banking.
Celsius touts itself as a platform focusing on services “that have been abandoned by big banks—things like fair interest, zero fees, and lightning quick transactions. Our goal is to disrupt the financial industry, one happy user at a time, and introduce financial freedom through crypto.”
The platform offers users a four-step process, including downloading the app on android or IOs, getting verified, and transferring cryptos to the platform’s custodial wallet.
After that, users can earn healthy rates of interest that are paid out weekly. The list of cryptos that can be lent to earn interest include top assets like bitcoin, ethereum, cardano, polkadot, luna and matic.
Rates of between five and nine percent are common. Many stablecoins, including USDC and USDT, can also be used and earn interest on the platform.
Celsius also facilitates borrowing, against crypto reserves of users. Borrowing rates are often as low as one percent. Celsius recently announced that its borrowing services have been approved for California residents, one of the more restrictive states for CeFi and DeFi usage.
Brian Rose, creator and host of London Real, spoke with Alex Mashinsky of Celsius about how new banking paradigms are becoming the default experience of a younger generation of users:
LR: “We were all born into this paradigm, this weird relationship where the banks control the money, and you’re not smart enough to manage your own money. And we don’t teach money in school, and we have this weird relationship, where like you said, we have to spend hours and days trying to reprogram our minds that grew up in this reality that doesn’t reflect reality. And yet our children grow up in this space, where it’s all normal to them.”
Alex Mashinsky: “Yes, just to galvanize what you just said, we’re talking about transfer of all the money in the world, but it’s also transfer of all the trust in the world, right? So we used to trust the financial system, we used to trust the banks. And the reason they paid us less and less interest every year is because they said, ‘Well you already trust us, so we know, if we can pay you less, you would still stick around.”
There’s an old (well, as old as cryptos) statement, “Not your keys, not your crypto,” and there are risks when holding crypto on any custodial platform or exchange.
But millions of users do hold crypto on exchanges like Coinbase, and Celsius also boasts a very large base of over a million users. It has been operating since 2017, offering good interest yields, low rates for loans, zero fees, and fast transaction times.