This week’s AMA begins here with updates from Alex, followed by a few questions with Leah and Camilla, and ends with community questions. As always, the timestamp from YouTube is hyperlinked to each question below.
Summary: Alex starts with some updates, including the exciting news from this week that Celsius will soon begin subsidizing ACH/SEPA deposits into the app so that they are free, and that loans are available against all 30 assets, including CEL– which is currently live most places and should be rolled out fully in the US by early next week. Additionally, if you love Celsius and want to help grow and improve the community, apply to be an ambassador!
As previously announced, CEL will soon be listed on a major exchange, and upcoming partnerships (Celsius API integration for idle assets) with two major exchanges will be all be announced in August. Furthermore, both the app and the website will be updated with a fresh look, and a Celsius desktop app is now out in beta, starting with institutional and corporate accounts. Additionally, for US users, Celsius is exploring allowing accredited investors to earn-in-CEL through a partnership with BnkToTheFuture, and is also looking into other similar partnerships to allow US users to buy CEL directly in the app. Celsius is also working to enable holding assets in self-directed IRAs, although this is not yet finalized.
Finally, the team spent some time talking about several of Celsius’ core values. Regarding transparency, Alex discussed the CoinDesk article and said that while Celsius has offered uncollateralized loans in the past, they have been <1% of loans and <5% of AUM, and have only been given to institutions with balance sheets in the billions. Furthermore, Celsius will be uploading all regulatory material and any licenses they have from all jurisdictions to the website next week in the spirit of transparency. Lastly, the team discussed bringing services to the unbanked– and how Celsius may go about bringing fee-free and high-yield accounts to these customers who are often most harmed by predatory financial institutions and for whom Celsius could do the most good. Furthermore, development and expansion of the Celsius API– a program Leah is leading– could be huge to fostering widespread adoption and increases in AUM, both with crypto wallets and exchanges but also with traditional financial services such as banks and Cash App.
And if you’d like to earn interest on your crypto, gold, and stablecoins with Celsius, scroll to the end for instructions on how to get $20 in BTC when you sign up.
Celsius Updates
- Rates raised on several coins. BTC, ETH, and XAUT (Tether Gold) saw jumps in rates to around 4.5%, while the rate on LTC is now above 5%. Celsius is fully deployed on these coins and needs more, thus the increased rates (simple supply and demand).
- ACH and SEPA. Users can buy 3 or 4 assets (based on your location) directly in the app, and start earning interest immediately. Celsius will also start subsidizing the current transfer fees (free bank transfers!) but this has not been rolled out yet.
- Loans available against 30 assets, including CEL token. Users in the US are included in this as well, and this will be fully rolled out early next week. All states that can take normal loans can take loans against CEL. 1:1 loans against stablecoins will also be available soon.
- New Yorkers can earn, too. Just a reminder– New York State has been able to earn interest on USDC and ETH, as well as BTC, for the past few weeks.
- Become an ambassador! Read a description of what ambassadors do here and sign up here. If you love Celsius and want to help grow and improve the community, as well as get some special benefits, come join us.
Questions with Leah and Camilla
Q: Leah– tell us everything about yourself!
Leah: I’ve been with Celsius since very early on, and have worked in many roles, but settled in Business Development (BD) after the ICO. Since then, I’ve been working to grow things– like our API program that interacts with firms like Bitwala and Mode, our treasury management program for institutions, and our staking programs that we started with Dash and are now expanding further. I’ve been really lucky with Celsius that I’ve lived all over the world while working here, and I think that’s given me a really unique perspective on what our community looks like in all of these places– I was able to get out of our bubble in the US and see how crypto is utilized all around the world.
Q: Camilla– tell us about yourself– and more about the BD team since I hear you are hiring!
Camilla: I made my switch from traditional finance to the crypto space in late 2018, and started at Celsius earlier this year. We are looking to grow the Business Development team– we need people who are passionate about this space and who can bring in new ideas, especially in new areas that we may be getting into.
Alex: Some of the things that we are working in– CeFi, DeFi, staking, DEXs, institutional lending, partnerships with other companies (like Chainlink, Litecoin). Basically, everything in crypto we are working with in one way or another– so if you know a lot about one of these subjects, reach out to us on LinkedIn or email ([email protected], [email protected]).
Q: Could you two tell us more about the exchanges Celsius is planning to work with?
Camilla: We’ve been working hard to negotiate with Tier 1 exchanges– but we’re looking for partners who want to work with Celsius, not just someone who we pay to list the token. But we are very close on these negotiations– and more people will have access to the token, which is always a good thing.
Leah: We have many partners coming in from the exchange side and more exchanges are looking into offering interest-bearing accounts, but we’ve got two exchange partnerships that we’re going to announce in August. We’re very excited about this, and they will be offering interest to their clients both in the US and globally. As we grow the team, we will be able to integrate with more wallets, exchanges, and custodians.
Camilla: We’re also seeing interest from more unique clients, such as large family offices or boutique asset-management funds, and we are currently rolling out a desktop version of our app in beta. And please contact us if you’re interested in trying this out!
Q: How do you think we can distill down what makes Celsius special compared to everyone else?
Leah: I think the passion of our employees is huge, but especially in BD, our network that we have built allows us to stay on the cutting edge of this industry. Staking is a great example– when we added it last year with Dash, it as about to explode, and we wanted to stay in front of that.
Camilla: It’s really just a bunch of listening– we’re out there listening to the community, and listening to our institutional clients– and sometimes things come up that we may not have thought of before.
Leah: Also, just know that there are many of us from Celsius in the Telegram group– I was up until 2 AM reading messages last night. But even if we aren’t actively posting there, we are reading a lot of the messages there, and it can be a great place to find ideas as well.
Community Questions
Q: Could you speak more about the CoinDesk article?
Alex: Our community responded strongly to this article. Specifically, in terms of uncollateralized loans– these have been less than 1% of our loans offered, less than 5% of our AUM, and were only done for companies who had balance sheets of $1 billion or more.
Alex: I’ve said this 100 times before– he can pay you that right now if he wants to– they just choose not to pay you 8.6%. I think we’d need a few hundred billion dollars in AUM before it will bother Jamie– since they have trillions of AUM. However, after the recent clarification from the US OCC, we are looking to partner with as many banks as possible that want to offer interest on crypto to their clients. We have a partner bank in Germany, in Switzerland, and in the UK. So this is something we are actively pursuing, and encourage any banks who want to offer this to their clients to reach out to us.
Leah: I think it’s also important to keep in mind that with banks, there are conflicting interests from the shareholders– I don’t think the shareholders would be excited if JP Morgan decided to start paying back 8.6% to their customers.
Q: In the future, will Celsius users be able to hold fiat currency in their wallets?
Leah: It’s definitely something we’re looking at, but there are a number of different licenses that you would have to get in specific jurisdictions. I think the better question is– why would you need to? We have 11 stablecoins at this point– so my personal opinion is that it makes more sense to create a seamless user experience where we allow you to take paychecks in stablecoins, or receive payments and invoices in stablecoins– this way you don’t need a cash account. But ultimately we are working to reduce the friction of people converting their assets into stablecoins, as well conversion to all of the other assets that we support.
Alex: And now, following the announcement from the US OCC, banks are looking forward to partnering with companies like us– so theoretically we should be able to offer all of the traditional banking services you need while not charging you any fees.
Q: Can a Celsius employee run away with our crypto?
Alex: No– Celsius has several distinct layers of protection that prevent this. Our wallets are multi-sig– which means several people need to authorize transactions, with a specific tool– which I won’t go into any more details about– for any of this to happen. Also, all of our withdrawal addresses are whitelisted, meaning that the coins can’t go anywhere else but preset addresses. And all of our keys are encrypted and protected by MPC, which helps keeps them safe.
Q: What does Celsius have planned for the future?
Camilla: I think growing is one of the main things we will be doing– we have a great platform, and there’s tremendous demand for it– and growing our company will help to satisfy that demand. There are new regions that we want to expand into– specifically Asia, including Singapore and Australia. We’re also always looking for new ways to earn yield to help our customers.
Alex: We are aiming for 1 million customers and having $4 billion in AUM next year. We want to keep growing all of the aspects of our company I mentioned earlier– CeFi, DeFi, staking, institutional lending. And we’re always looking to be innovators and leaders in this space, and to continuously raise the bar. Additionally, we believe in transparency, and publishing our numbers– whether they are good or bad.
Q: Is there anything to ensure that Celsius will always give 80% back to the community?
Alex: The 80/20 split is not a fixed number– most of 2019, we paid more than 80%, even close to 90%. However, when we notice we aren’t paying enough, we just raise the rates– and this is what we did last week. And these rates can change every week, and they’re always based on what we’re earning. Right now, we’d love to get another $100–200 million in BTC and ETH. But we also know that if we start lowering your rates, that you’re going to take your money elsewhere, so that is always a strong incentive for us to consistently give back as much as we can.
Q: What are implications of repeated hard forks on the value and growth of cryptocurrencies?
Leah: I’m more of the opinion that there will be multiple ecosystems within the crypto world– and I think Celsius is a great example of one of those ecosystems. I think hard forks in general are tough because they lead to economic diluting of a community but also internal fighting. And I think this can waste a lot of energy, as each chain is trying to prove that they are the superior one.
Q: Now that the BnkToTheFuture equity application is closed, what are the next steps?
Camilla: We have ambitious plans, including our $4 billion goal that Alex mentioned– and we need to bring in more brilliant, passionate people to help build the platform in a smart, scalable way that is in the best interest of our community.
Alex: There’s a lot to do– right now we have 12 new people who have accepted positions at Celsius. I think one of the most important things is getting the app available in 100 different languages, because right now it’s only in English. I think educating people on why we are doing this is so important– and showing them that we can prove that we are acting in their best interest– but this takes a tremendous amount of work, and needs to be done in whatever language they may speak.
Leah: I think using the funds to continue to build that bridge between the mainstream and the crypto world is so important– and that can come in many forms. Whether it’s through marketing and brand recognition, or partnerships that make it easy to access crypto through our app or others we partner with– it all brings adoption, which is what we’re aiming for.
Alex: And I would just add one thing– having more money in our balance sheet helps protect our customers even more in the case of a breach or loss. And importantly, we always have enough money to pay back our customers, even if every single one of our users needed to withdraw all of their money. We would have no problem paying everyone back– we would have to close the company since we wouldn’t have any more money to lend, but we wouldn’t have an issue paying everyone back.
Q: How exactly did the BnkToTheFuture raise work?
Alex: The way the equity raise worked– the investors contributed ~$9 million, and Tether contributed $10 million. BnkToTheFuture then created LLCs with all of this money, based on where you invested from, and shares diluting the original shares held by Daniel and me were issued to these LLCs, held by BnkToTheFuture.
Q: Do we have a date on when you will announce the new exchange?
Camilla: We don’t have an exact date, because it is a bit of a process, but we are very close to announcing this. But trust me, it will be a big announcement when we get there.
Alex: And this is maybe an example of something crypto should copy from Wall Street. Typically, if a company is going to be be listed on NASDAQ, they pay the company to be able to list them there! But in crypto, it’s the other way around– and we think it’s a privilege for us to bring our community, the best community in crypto, to be customers at an exchange.
Q: How will we onboard the unbanked in society?
Leah: I think that as a crypto industry, we tend to build walls around ourselves– people need to learn how to hold their own keys, or use wallets, or navigate an exchange– and that’s no good for mass adoption, because people don’t have time for that or time to learn the technology. So I think you bring new people into the ecosystem by going to their level first, and seeing what they need– and there’s not one person in this world who doesn’t want passive interest income.
And the goal is to make it so simple to get into this system, and the benefits so clear, that they still will understand even if they don’t want to go down the crypto rabbit hole– I don’t understand how electric lights work, but I use them every day– it needs to be that simple.
Camilla: And these people who are unbanked or underbanked are the ones most likely to get hit with more fees, high interest rates on debt, and loan sharks– we want to enable people to have more financial services that are affordable, especially for those who fees will hurt the most. So always lowering the barriers to entry, including having the app available on their phone, is huge.
Alex: There’s about 2 billion unbanked or underbanked people in the world– and to serve them, I think we first need to serve the middle class. Our average account is something like $14,000, but we want that to be lower and lower. And by distributing the cost of our services among many middle-class and above users, we can then ensure that these services stay free for those groups who they will be most beneficial for.
We’ve partnered before with the UN SDG initiative, trying to provide these services to people who don’t have access to them. I’m working on a project right now that does something similar, with the UN and the Gates Foundation– using the blockchain to track the distribution of these charitable funds, to verify that they are going to the people they are intended for.
Camilla: This marketplace is definitely growing at a rapid pace. We talk about adoption– there are more institutions coming in, and more people looking to invest in the space. I certainly don’t see us reaching a point of saturation anytime soon, as there is an extraordinary amount of space to grow into.
In terms of other products– we are offering financial services, and I think there will always be different flavors that we can offer in that sense. We have lots of ideas that we’re working on around that space– but our core business is lending and borrowing, so we’re build out from there.
Leah: I think that one of the biggest things when I first came on, before we even had any assets, Alex always said– “the deeper your pools, the more you get to make the rules.” Ultimately, the partnerships that we form with other wallets, exchanges, and custodians to offer interest in their apps to their users means that we’re able to scale our assets at an accelerated rate. As more institutions come in– there are other lenders are out there, and if we have more assets, we will become the first stop for the institutions looking to borrow assets.
Alex: While we do make most of our income from institutions, it is not the only source. We make good money with our retail loans as well, and we lend to exchanges, and we make money on DeFi. There is also so much space for growth both in terms of new institutions we can onboard, but also how much we can lend out to each of these borrowers.
Leah: The vision for the program is to be able to access crypto that is just sitting idle in your wallet, and provide you returns on it. We’re looking to partner with these platforms storing billions in crypto assets– and their users trust us by default, because the platforms trust us and the users trust the platforms. However, the due diligence for these integrations takes months– the Bitwala integration took a year, the two exchanges we’re integrating with in August took at least four months– so these companies are really taking their time to make sure they trust us.
Cash app is interesting, because what we’ve primarily done so far is integrating with crypto platforms, but I think there’s also a massive benefit to being able to take our Celsius API, which are fully mature (and the most advanced in the space), and taking it to these mainstream partners to try and integrate them as well. Cash App alone earned 6% of their revenue last year from Bitcoin transactions– and I think it’s insane to think that every other digital wallet isn’t looking into this as well.
But the bigger our community, and the more assets we hold, the more we get to set the precedent. We want to set the bar high for the standard in this community– and we strive for this with our transparency but also by being very selective when choosing with partners to work with.
Q: Do you think that we will have Euro stablecoins soon?
Camilla: Euro stablecoins do already exist, and I think stablecoins have broad utility in the crypto space. You need to do your due diligence on them, because not all operate in the same way– but I think it would be great to have a more widely-adopted Euro stablecoin, as that would help reduce the friction between moving from Euro fiat to cryptocurrency.
Alex: The experience that we want you to have is that if you put your money in Celsius and forgot about it for ten years– we want you to be able to come back then and still be able to redeem your money. But the problem with stablecoins is that some of these issuers are too small so we can’t guarantee that you will be able to redeem them for money down the line. When you’re talking about BUSD, GUSD, USDC, TUSD, USDT– you know that you will be able to get your money back later on. So we want to be sure that we are only offering stablecoins that we are confident in.
Alex: There are legal requirements and restrictions that relate to IRA services– it’s still a bit of a murky area, but we are looking into this currently. We think that you are able to hold these assets, but we do need to make it much easier– but with ACH in place that should help simplify things. When we solve all of the pieces, we should be able to get this in place.
Q: If a business wants to lend stablecoins to Celsius, what are the proper steps for this?
Leah: It all depends on what you’re looking for– you can get a corporate account and set it up today, and start using it as a normal corporate account immediately– that’s the easiest thing to do. If you do want to plug it into your backend system, we’ll give you an API key (either read/write or full functionality). And this will be developed further in the future– such as buildings GUIs that people can plug into as well.
Q: What will it take to be able to purchase CEL tokens in the app in the US?
Alex: This is a hard question– we do have a solution that we are working on to allow US accredited investors to earn interest in CEL, as we know this is something many US customers want. We’re actually working with BnkToTheFuture to allow this– so if you’ve already onboarded with them for our equity round or another company’s equity round, you should already be okay. Unfortunately, for buying CEL in the US, there are other restrictions–but we are working with other partners to try and create a solution in a similar way for this. We do feel like US users are being penalized– and are trying to take steps to remedy this, such as increasing rates on in-kind earning.
On that note, we are also planning to add all of our compliance information to the Celsius website– licenses, regulations, etc.– and that should be up by Monday.
Camilla: We haven’t touched on diversity much in this conversation– but I think one of the biggest things we talk about internally is ways we can bring more women into crypto and technology. We definitely think about how we reach women, or how we might encourage them to use our platform– and I think it’s about education, and about communicating through different channels. While we’re trending in the right direction, crypto is still definitely not 50/50 men to women, and I think we still have a lot left to do there in terms of education for what crypto can do for everyone, and also what women can bring working in this space.
Leah: I think you really have to lead by example– and I think Celsius has done a really good job of that. From the start, the core team outside of the founders– it’s women! And I feel that we are able to bring more women into this company because we do already have the diversity here, and this allows us to think about these issues and these challenges in ways that can truly allow us to solve them.
Alex: The problem is that the crypto industry started with all of these groups that were already dominated by men– and so from the beginning, it wasn’t as easy for women to get into it. And we’re actually releasing updates for both our website and our app that were designed with simplifying use and flow– and some of these changes were made with women in mind as well. The update includes real Celsius staff in all of the photos (no stock photos) and should be out sometime in the next 2–3 weeks.
Want to unbank yourself with Celsius (and get a free $20)?
- Install the Celsius wallet (https://celsius.network/get-the-app/)
- Use a referral code during registration (148895d2c9)
- Deposit $200 of crypto or stablecoins
You will earn $20 in BTC once you hold your deposit for 30 days
