The longest Bitcoin bear market in history is shining a light on the crypto investors and long-term strategists who are holding their crypto, despite the precipitous price declines since December 2017.
Investors who park their crypto in Celsius Network are consistently bearing interest.
The New York-based platform is thriving at a new business model that has far-reaching implications. The Ethereum-based, peer-to-peer crypto lending platform has generated over $630 million in crypto loans to exchanges and hedge funds since launching its mobile app in July 2018.
An innovator who holds patents for technologies that have transformed several industries, founder Alex Mashinsky was an early developer of Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP).
Says Mashinsky,
“Celsius continues to be the only mobile app in the world that offers interest income on 7 different digital assets. We have consistently paid out interest to all our depositors – for 26 weeks in a row – and saw record payouts in December as our community grew. We continue to add new users every day and see $500k-$1m worth of coin deposits daily.
One of the most surprising trends we saw during 2018 was the resilience of our HODLer community; despite BTC and ETH losing half of their value during the second half of 2018 we saw 184 out of 191 days in which deposits outnumbered withdrawals. Like you, Celsius was in the market accumulating BTC and ETH almost every day as we collected interest on our loans and distributed that back to our members.”
Its largest single dollar loan was $5 million.
The app has had 40,000 downloads, and Celsius has received over $50 million in crypto deposits paying interest as high as 7.1%. Celsius says its growth has been substantial and positive, and that it doesn’t use its clients’ crypto as working capital for the company.
“We did not liquidate a single loan and we did not have a single default from any of our borrowers. We did not lose a single crypto asset or dollar from all our lending activities in 2018.”
Celsius is targeting $200 million in deposits and over $2 billion in crypto loans for 2019.
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