Wow, what a good time to be a Celsian! I remember the first time I joined Celsius Network back in August, the CEL token was around $0.30, and now the price has more than quadrupled from the time of writing this article. There are many reasons to show that they deserve to be currently the 41st highest market cap in the cryptocurrency space. 

Summary of Celsius

For those who only heard of Celsius Network for the first time, they are a CeFi platform lead by a charismatic leader named Alex Mashinsky, to which the platform has been touted as the disruptor of banks. Rightly so, if you checked their website, their motto is "Unbank Yourself" to which their goal is to give more to the commmunity instead of focusing on rewarding themselves and their shareholders like what normal banks will do. The website also shows the interests that you can earn up to 22.40% on your crypto assets. For major crypto assets, you're earning up to 6.2% on Bitcoin, up to 9.65% on Ethereum and up to 15.89% on stablecoins such as USDT. Let's deep dive into the pros and cons for this platform.

1) High Interest Earning Platform Compared to Conventional Banks

I've wrote a post before about how these crypto platforms are advantageous to the conventional banks in Malaysia. Here's how Celsius work. You deposit the crypto assets that you have into their platform, and the interests will be automatically be calculated based on the time and date that they received your funds in their platform. You can choose to earn your interests according to which assets you deposited to the platform or to earn your interests in CEL. The APY interests calculated are according to how many CEL tokens you have in your portfolio which is shown below.

If you currently don't have any CEL tokens, your interests calculated starts from the lowest tiers of the respective tokens.

For example, if you have Bitcoin and no CEL tokens in your portfolio, your interests start at 4.51%, no matter if you earn in Bitcoin or in CEL. According to the Loyalty Tier, you need at least 15% worth of CEL value in $ to qualify for the highest interest rates of 6.2% earned in CEL. You can still increase your APY interest by 10% if you hold at least 5% of CEL tokens. If you earn interests in Bitcoin despite having 15% value of CEL tokens, you'll by default be earning 4.51%, so make sure you switch to earning in CEL to enjoy the highest interest benefits. You will see your rewards in your app like this when you click on any particular currency.

The strategy I found amazing about Celsius is that if for example you have BTC, ETH, USDT and CEL in one portfolio, you can switch all of your BTC, ETH and USDT to be earning your rewards in CEL token, so you're getting CEL interests from each token AND earn interests of 5.12% from holding your CEL token, and your funds will be compounded weekly. The weekly compounding effect of earning all your assets in CEL enables your CEL asset to grow slowly but exponentially, and is something currently unheard of in the CeFi space. The biggest regret I made is the picture I shown above, where I earned pretty low CEL interests because I didn't buy any CEL tokens to earn more interests due to my thoughts that the CEL token value will be relatively stable and I diversify a lot of money to try other platforms and to see which platform performs best for me, in addition to not being able to swap tokens in the app (which will be explained in the latest updates below). At least I feel happy that my little number of CEL tokens that I earned did rise 4x, not bad after all.

2) Secure, Transparent & Trustworthy

The great feature about this app is that you are able to deposit and withdraw your funds freely without much issues. There are no minimum deposit amounts, no deposit and withdrawal fees, and best of all, no locking periods for your funds to earn interests. Their business model is quite similar to conventional banks, where they used our deposited funds to loan out to companies and earn interests from them. They claim that 80% of the revenue will be given back to the depositors while keeping 20% for their profits and operation costs. 2FA, password and HODL mode is used to secure your funds from any attacks from hackers. If HODL mode is on, you can't withdraw your funds, pay tokens to your friends and family via CelPay or change whitelist addresses, and this adds more security to your funds which acts like locking your own money into your own vault. According to the FAQ, the company is also audited by NLP (Nyman Libson Paul), based in the UK. Since I'm not a financial advisor or an accountant, I'm not sure how NLP audits the company, so I'll leave the link for you guys to do your own research on this. For a casual investor like me, the way I determine trustworthiness is by watching Alex's AMAs on YouTube, where he'll breakdown updates on the Celsius network and answers the critical questions asked by us every Friday. His charisma and ability to show that he wants what's best for the community is the reason why I trust this platform more and more.

Furthermore, instead of hiring an audit, they are also introducing the proof-of-community protocol (click the link under "When will there be a way to independently verify Celsius' Assets Under Management?"), which means all of us are the auditors and we can confirm the proper amount of interest for the amount of coins we are holding. Celsius can also prove that they hold at least as much in assets as they say they do, and you are able to see each week how many people voted and confirmed that they received the correct amount of interest. Besides, we are also able to see that the interest came into the wallet from institutions and is not circling within the company. This is great news as we can have more transparency as to how the funds are moved. Read their FAQ for more information on how their platform work. In addition to the security question, they also have a program where they reward white-hat hackers up to $50,000 on bug bounties to fortify their defense against hackers.

3) CelSwap

This is huge, They recently announced this feature on the latest AMA where you are able to swap tokens and provide liquidity inside the Celsius app, just like Uniswap. If what I think is true, it means I don't have to withdraw and exchange my CEL tokens in other platforms which reduces the hassle of moving around your funds elsewhere a lot. Expecting that there will be a lot of bugs and issues with this functionality at first, but hopefully this feature will encourage more people to join Celsius.

Now on to the downsides:

1) Pre-CelSwap

Before the announcement of CelSwap, currently you can't swap any tokens in the platform which means you have to withdraw to exchanges and sell them. Adding the CelSwap feature will boost the user-friendliness of using the app. As for the fees, Alex has claimed that the fees will be 0.1% lower than uniswap (currently at 0.3% for uniswap), so we shall see how they implement this.

2) Money not fully guaranteed if it's lost

This is actually standard across all platforms in the cryptocurrency world. According to Celsius's terms and conditions under 10) Risk Disclosure, your funds are not covered by insurance against losses, so it's best not to put all your savings into one basket and spread out your risks. Also according to FAQ, they'll only use their balance sheet to cover the damages, which means whatever they have they can refund you but you won't be recovering all of your funds if all funds in Celsius are being stolen. At the moment, there's no report of the platform being hacked but still you'll need to keep an eye on this risk.

3) Lack of tokens and features

Celsius is a crypto bank that only limits their features on loaning funds to businesses and platform users, in addition to sending CEL to your friends and family via CelPay. They lack the features Crypto.com have by providing visa cards for users to pay their bills and earn cashbacks. Likewise, they don't have many tokens listed on their platform, with big names such as Cardano, Tron, Binance Coin, BAND, Algorand, etc. to name a few, although Zcash, UNI and AAVE is announced to be listed next, more options will definitely be great.

4) Interest rates may change from week to week

I don't see this as much of a bad thing. The first time I joined Celsius, they are only giving a minimum of 8.69% interests per year in stablecoins which is paid weekly. This is still 8 times more than what the conventional banks can offer. As long as they adjust the rates according to the market demands on the tokens, I'll be happy to have my assets kept there as long as they prove themselves to be sustainable, to which they are currently.

Final Thoughts

Celsius is a clean, simple, user-friendly platform which helps you earn high and sustainable rewards without complicated conditions. It's definitely a great platform if you plan to just keep your unused money in a place where you want your money to grow so that one day you can retire early without having to worry too much on debts and other money issues. However, there are other platforms out there like Binance and Crypto.com if you want to have more options in buying tokens and have more utility in using your tokens. I think you, me, and the Celsius team would love to see everyone finally getting the financial freedom we deserve, and you can start your journey by using my referral code (1587314a52) to earn yourself $20 in Bitcoin when you deposit $200 worth of assets into Celsius.