AMA – Ask Mashinsky Anything

Hello to all of the Celsians! This is my 3rd AMA and we received over 600 questions which is great!

Before I get started with the announcements, we are still running our campaign to give to those affected by the Australian wildfires, by taking a loan with Celsius we will donate $100 to charities that are helping people recover from the devastating fires.

We raised the platinum earn in CEL bonus from 30% to 35%. We also raised the CEL holding requirements for the bonus levels. You need to hold enough CEL to equal 5%-10% of your total deposits to earn Silver tier, 10%-15% to earn gold tier, and 15%+ for platinum tier. These changes are designed to boost CEL demand and we may continue to raise these levels next year.

We are raising the interest rate on your first BTC up to 8.1% earned in CEL for platinum tier members. 6% for regular tier, 6.6% for silver tier, 7.2% for gold tier, then 8.1% for platinum tier. All rates are for in CEL interest on your first BTC.

We launched our business with Korbit, the largest exchange in Korea! We are now their preferred wallet and start with managing a portion of their treasury.

As of february 1st, 2020 everything is compounding. EVERYTHING. All 25 coins and tokens. All members even the US. No matter if you earn in CEL or in kind.

We just launched EOS backed loans, you can get a loan for as low as 3.75% if you pay in CEL.

We have a list in the app of what is up next, we can only add coins that we can earn yield on.

You have to look at interest on a scale, Bitcoin an stablecoins have an inverse relation. When Bitcoin borrowing goes up, stablecoin borrowing goes down. All rates are indicative for the current market behaviour.

CEL value is based on adoption. Right now we have about 38% of our users earning in CEL, and the HODL ratio (members holding their earned CEL) of 83% which is fantastic!

We will continue to partner will amazing companies and offer our API and infrastructure to offer our services to their users. We are also going to utilize CELpay and our referral system.

Our goals remain the same, we want to give the global community a way to earn interest. Everybody needs to earn more money on their money.

Currently we only lend in the crypto market, but we plan on earning yield from a variety of sources in other markets. We want to earn yield for our community in the best ways possible.

When we did the ICO we burned about 5,000,000 tokens. We have some tokens allocated to advisors, but if those do not get distributed, there is a chance we may burn a few million CEL.

Yes, we partnered with a great company that will allow you to download all of your recorded interest income.

Banks are not your friends, banks earn 15%-17% on your deposits and only pay you 1% we earn high single digits and pay back at least 80% of it.

I have spent over 35 years building circuits, networks and 8 Tech StartUps! Im very comfy in this zone.

It cannot last forever. Every time you make a deposit, you are deciding whether Celsius is successful, or our competitor is successful. Same with taking a loan, it's the depositors that choose.

The crypto community needs to gain the trust of people by delivering results. There have been so many scam projects, they block out the great ones, we need to focus on building trust and bringing results.

We use Cel effectively as a treasurer, we hold several million tokens. Right now we use money from our earnings, but in the future we plan to start using our treasure for payment. By holding CEL, you help us keep our cost of capital low, and pay our users more. All the people holding CEL are enabling us to grow much faster and more efficiently.

I am a huge fan of hardware wallets, we are working on a number of integrations. We are also building a completely new way to do DeFi! Stay tuned.

Yes, it's called PAXG and it’s pending to be added to our wallet right now.

We are working on this, it's not just states but countries as well! We are a company of only 65 people and using our resources as best we can. It's very expensive and time consuming adding new areas, but it's a priority.

Listings are very important, we have had to say no to several exchanges because they charge $500K or more. We are going to add them, but it will be on our terms when it makes sense financially.

We are going through an audit now, and will publish our results. We are also publishing a fund manager to prove we hold the assets we do. Transparency is a main focus for us. Celsius in on track to be profitable in march. To date, we have paid over $9 million to our community!

We want to drive demand for CEL. We want to reward the people who are supporting us most and voting with their wallet to earn the most.

If you are a parent you can open up an account and act on her behalf, legally we cannot support members under age 18.

We are working on spending programs. Right now we are a HODLer community and are focusing on earning interest and paying the most to our community.

Right now we're focused on growth, so unless you are providing a solution, we do not have the resources to partner with smaller companies.

I think now is a great time to get in with the halving around the corner. Using an app called iBillionare, you can auto invest small amounts each week.

The most important thing is we are acting in your best interest. Many projects in this space are master toll collectors, we do not charge fees, we structured this system to work for you the depositor.

We have addressed this by introducing compound interest for every asset we support.

We are a corporation and there is some level of risk, we need to be profitable, and to grow and make money. As long as you see deposits growing and us paying more, we will be a strong company.

Currently we are not working on a browser interface, but we have partners that use us and provide you our service that offer a web interface.

I want to create a payment system that is far superior to credit cards, we are building a payment tool that is going to give you that “Wow” moment. We are working on these solutions now.

Purchase from coins in app with a credit card will be here by the end of february.

We have huge plans in Africa! We have to wait to get approvals in those countries before we can begin.

We have over 200 institutions transacting with us, more than anyone else! You need to ask the other guys where they are earning their money.

All loans are dollar based, there is never a case where you owe more than you borrowed. If you borrow $100 at 5% you will pay $105 back no matter the price of the collateral.

We are working very close with CMC answering all of their questions, if listed today we would be around number 70-75 in the top 100!

Uphold is a great company, I have been able to spend a lot of time with their team and CEO, we would really like to do a tight integration to support all of their currency capabilities.

No, any withdrawals will not affect your interest rates. You earn exactly the same rates no matter how much you deposit, or how much you withdraw.

They are an excellent custodian, a trust company in Nevada. We are using Prime Trust as our licensed custodian so we can roll out services in New York.

There are a couple different ways this will play out, kind of a doomsday scenario where Bitcoin goes to $100K and all faith is lost in the dollar. The second path is interest for everybody, because banks don't pay interest, governments don't pay interest, all of this is bad for you, we have a real opportunity to provide anyone in the world the chance to earn a fair rate of return on their money. There isn't a single person on this planet that doesn't want to earn more on their money, that's what we are trying to do.

We cannot fix everything, today we are just working on your financial health.

Yes! We are looking for partners in every part of South America!

It's about building trust. We need to be transparent and build up people's trust. We also need your help! Using the app and tools like CELpay can help Celsius grow and offer more interest to more members.

Yes, we are working on multi-asset backed loans. We are bringing all kinds of magical features to the app.

If you are in New York or New Jersey and want to be an intern, come help us! We are looking for people to help us with all of this hard work!

The easiest thing to do is to open a second account with the other person KYC. Corporate accounts allow a little more flexibility.

They are trying! I say bad things about banks every day because they are stealing every one of us. Some of the largest investors in the world are becoming very worried about USD.

We want to hit $1 Billion in AUM. We want to help create new highs in Bitcoin through our services. We will be continuing to add assets to the app, hopefully around 10 more by the end of the year. We want you to be able to buy CEL in the app, buy coins in the app, and many other things. More depositors, more users, more loans, more profitability, and pay record interest to our users, these are our goals!

My name is Jeremie Beaudry and I am the general counsel and CCO at celsius. Im out of the georgia region, most of you know we are located in the northeast, but I am in Atlanta Georgia calling in from my house. If there are random disturbances whether it be a dog, cat, or baby screaming in the background, ultimately that is not my fault I just wanted to warn everybody about that.

I was introduced to Bitcoin in 2016 but I wish I bought some a lot sooner!

Atlanta, Georgia. I moved here as a kid.

I love Southpark, I drink out of my mug every day!

No, CEL is classified as a security and there is a litany of laws we have to follow, these laws do not allow us to pay CEL on BTC interest.

You need to bother Alex to get this through!

We are not an exchange and are unable to sell and deposit into a bank account.

There are some workarounds, you need to consult you tax accountant to move your crypto into a self directed IRA.

I have some friends at PAX, and we are looking to support PAXG. (gold stablecoin)

We are acquiring the correct licensing needed for us to operate in WA. We have to be very strategic when applying because these licenses are very expensive. In the meantime, we are trying to setup a partner that would allow us to operate.

Right now we do not plant to add sun-custody accounts. We have to have the person who’s holding the crypto’s information directly to comply with the bank secrecy act.

If you moved the coins from Coinbase, they are on your hard wallet and nowhere else.

I don’t watch the market too carefully, I would look for projects that have great teams and an actual use case.

I think will happen for non-US customers.

Right now Celsius is very geared towards crypto owners. Right now what seems to be the easiest way to get new people to join us through stablecoins.

It’s all about the correct licensing. We are strategically applying for states that require MTLs, they are very expensive to acquire and maintain.

Because CEL is regarded as a security, US users will not be able to earn CEL on BTC anytime soon.

I would really like to go to Hawaii! I’ve never been and heard it beautiful!

I don't really see why you would want to do that, I don’t see how it adds any value.

Yes, that’s something we need to develop as we scale. Right now, it’s a very manual process.

I am just wearing pajama pants on purpose right now ha ha.

In the US we are classified as a money service business, we have formalized AML and KYC program. We are registered with FINCEN

We are starting a soft launch for NY app, we have gotten a partnership that will allow us to operate there.

Right now, Bitgo is the actual custodian of your assets, they have insurance, and we also have a pool of funds to protect our users.

I’m not too familiar with it, it’s something that we couldn’t do in the US due to the security status of CEL

No, I’m not familiar with 70/30 and have heard any plans to change.

It is all because CEL is considered a security in the US. We have to follow rules as we are a Reg D corporation and have to follow the applicable laws.

I get outside counsel for my tax advice, right now crypto is considered property in the US. Generally when there is a change in price, there can be a tax consequence.

As of date, we haven’t received any action from regulators. Kraken is much bigger company that has the resources to make these kinds of reports. As we scale we would be happy to supply this information.

I haven’t seen it get any traction, I highly doubt stablecoins will be considered a security.

I am a US based attorney, please consult a tax professional in your region for specifics.

Licenses cost a ton of money. It’s amazing how well moted the money service business is. We are strategically getting state licenses to operate all over the country.

Before joining Celsius I worked for Bitgo, before that I had some experience in payments.

So in the US you have to have an undergraduate degree, then go to a law school and pass the BAR exam.

Yes! That is something we would Definitely like to integrate.

We really look for liquidity and demand. We have to be able to lend a new coin for yield and be able to have enough liquidity to buy.

I would love to move there! They are doing some amazing work in our space, I am trying to convince Alex and the team to transfer there. Right now, no plans though.

We do not have a time yet, we are doing a soft launch fairly soon.

That is the Bitlicense, we will apply for it in the future, as of right now, we have a partnership that will allow us to operate in NY soon.

CEL can still be used to discount loans in the US, a great benefit!

Celsius does not because we are not the custodian, Bitgo is.

Yes, if you acquire CEl from a DEX or other party, you are more than welcome do deposit it in the app.

Yes, Right now you can earn interest in California. We need to apply for licensing to offer loans there.

We use multiple legal sources, if we need the legal advice of E&Y we will certainly reach out to them again.

Right now as a private company, we do not have to file the same paperwork as a public one, we are trying to be transparent as possible and have listed a ton of the token Information on our website.

I really don’t see thT happening, the bill presenter has footed almost no traction and was just a reaction to Libra.

Yes, that is a highly demanded feature and will be coming out soon.

For privacy, we just do stuff within our community. Part of our AML process we do have to profile you based on buying habits and where you got your crypto.

Yes, we are working on bringing that capability to the app, although US users will be excluded do to CEL being a security.

I love Timmy, I think he is absolutely hilarious!

Just random stuff my wife used to decorate, including a bunch of books we will probably never read ha ha.

A: Thank you very much for attending my first ABA, which I can easily trademark! Thanks again for everyone joining, thanks for the questions, unfortunately I couldn't answer all of them but I think ultimately we will have another discussion where we can talk about compliance and legal stuff. Thank you everybody and we will talk soon!

Uphold just added Celsius to their wallet and we are excited to partner with them. They have 3 million users and we hope to add many of them to our platform and start earning their interest.

I’ve published several articles recently, one of them on CoinDesk about my view what’s good and bad about DeFi, how do we make DeFi mainstream. And also Rachel Wolfson, who already wrote about Celsius on Forbes and Cointelegraph, did a feature story about my presentation at Elev8 Las Vegas. Rachel did a great story about how the internet will one day be an application on the internet.

We are redirecting 80% of our marketing dollars from Google, Facebook & Apple ads to incentives for people to share the vision of Celsius Network. Our Community can help us grow using CelPay or earn $10 in BTC for every customer they refer with their own Referral Codes.

We paid close to $6,000,000 in interest to date. Unlike other competitors we put the money we earn back into the crypto community by buying coins off of the markets every day and distributing it as interest to our community. Already 40% of our users decided to earn their weekly interest payments in CEL. We have seen CEL perform very well against BTC and ETH, up 100% against ETH during the last year. That’s what users are looking at, deciding want they want to earn their interest in. We have currently $450 million in assets under management and are trying to make it to a billion, please help us stay the largest in this space. I believe we are doing the best job out there for our community. Just look at how much we have paid out. 62K Users, keep up to date with the community page in the app. $4.25 Billions in loans, and soon we will be publishing a new letter from BitGo and our other custodians to show we are making all of these transactions. In 2019 we added 17 coins! Most platforms only have 2 or 3, we are continuing to pay more on more coins. We want to add more staking coins. We have 400 ambassadors! Only thinking we would have 10 or 20 going into it. I have already gotten to work with some of them and we really appreciate your help with shows and events

We are launching New York State and Washington State, you will be able to deposit and take loans. In the next version you will be able to withdraw interest first, this way you will be able to withdraw any interest first before touching your principal. We are adding banking integrations as well as exchange integrations. This Includes moving money very easily in and out of your bank and exchanges. We are continuing to add more exchanges and provide more access there. Also working on purchasing CEL in the app. International users will have access to that first, we are still looking for a solution for our US users to buy CEL in app. I want to thank our partners, Infinito, Monarch, Uphold, Voyager and the half dozen new partners we will be announcing in January. All of these people have chosen Celsius as their interest earning program and I want to thank them for their support.

When you show someone a Dollar savings account that is earning 5%, 6%, 7%, it's much easier to convince people than trying to explain Bitcoin to them. Stablecoins are like the safe landing spot for new people into Crypto.

Great idea, we don't have it currently. You can only have one KYC/AML account but within that account we could make separate sections in the future.

Currently we are not adding compounding, it's something that is more complex from a technology standpoint. Because we change the rate every week, it creates a lot of issues. What we are trying to do now is to publish the highest rate. If we pay compounding, all it is going to do is lower the rate. The rates we pay are already high because we are giving back the most we can.

If you want a loan, open up the main menu, answer a few questions and you can get that loan. Some jurisdictions are limited, but if you have a company please reach out to us by email and we may be able to accommodate you.

I am most looking forward to adding more capabilities and growing the community. Our mission is to add 100 Million people and we are at 62 thousand. I know that sounds small but everything starts small. I think we did an amazing job this year. The capabilities we really need to work on are buying coins in the app, taking loans easier, and get more licenses and partners to reach more jurisdictions. We have amazing announcements coming in january, some of the largest companies in the world are partnering with Celsius and I can't wait to tell you! These are amazing companies in Japan, Korea, and Europe and so on. When you hear them you won't believe that these companies are working with Celsius. You are going to Love it!

Next release! Either the end of this year, or the first couple weeks of january. Our tech team is working extremely hard, we have to spend a ton of time testing making sure there are no bugs. I want to thank our 200 beta testers for helping us find the bugs and helping us fix them!

There is no conflict between shareholders and CEL holders. Alex Mashinsky is the largest shareholder of Celsius, and the single largest CEL token holder. The company itself holds close to half of the tokens. The higher the token value, the more Celsius is worth. There is no conflict. The beauty of our model, unlike banks, unlike most financial institutions, they have to take value from depositors to give to shareholders, we can keep all of that value within the community. Celsius itself just happens to be the largest token holder in the community. There is no situation where Celsius wants the CEL token to be lower because we are the largest holder. We structured the model and ICO this way to be sure we kept the interests in line.

The treasury is used for several things. It will allow the company to grow, we use it for bonuses, distributions to people who work for us. Its essentially another source of income for the company.

We would love to do that today, and we used to, but we decided to pause because of uncertainty on the regulatory front. We are all waiting for the regulators to let us know what is allowed, and what is not allowed. Today it is just not clear if we can pay CEL on BTC in the US, so we are just being extra cautious.

Ideally you will be able to link your bank in the middle of January. If you would like to be a beta tester on that please email Lis@Celsius.Network and we will add you to the testing program. We have a lot of features coming in.

We do! Most of the employees are remote, some in New York, New Jersey, Israel and the UK. If you have great skills and want to be a part of the company please email me Alex@mashinsky.com or Alex@Celsius.network. I do answer my own emails!

The answer is very simple, we earn it. If you look at the rates on other sites, for example CMC has a section for borrowing and lending where you can see the market rates. Celsius is just working with larger institutions and larger exchanges that allow us to charge more because we have such a large basket of crypto. Also because we have 25 coins and most of our competitors have 2 or 3. Rates go up and down, for example there is a lot of BTC available on the market, so the rate is low.

Today in the app you are able to find your transaction report. We posted about it on twitter a couple days ago.

Yes we are adding ACH, SEPA, and still looking for a partner for asain countries. Come january, you are going to have ACH and SEPA with more to come later in the year.

No plans right now, will be visiting serbia, might be able to stop by for an AMA!

No haha I usually fly coach but on long hauls I need a bed to sleep on. The energy is the passion. We all hate banks and these financial institutions that are stealing from us. I was working as the CEO of a public company and I quit that to do this. I know that if I don't do this, nobody will. I'm excited every day to do this and I work with amazing people every day.

All governments in the world are just tax collectors that spend it in an inefficient way. The people with influence get more, while the people without getting less. Putting all of that on the blockchain takes a lot of the power away from politicians, and it would be very hard to convince them to do that.

Today there are many broker dealers that will allow you to do that. You can call up your broker and get a loan against your stocks anytime, that's not something celsius can add value to. When we get are able to integrate digital certificates, then we can loan against your car or other assets that can be put on the blockchain.

Nexo is like a gangster running around doing things. Nexo claims to be a bank on their website, if you want to give your money to a bank…… there you go. Nexo does not pay you BTC or ETH, and they operate in jurisdictions without licensing. I'm not sure how they stay compliant, but we use 3 separate law offices to be sure we are following all of the rules.

We are constrained by the size of the crypto community, you are right that ads are not going to do it. It's going to take each one of us to share what Celsius does and show people how it can change lives by getting your money to work for you. 100s of millions use Cashapp and Venmo because they made it easy, Celsius has just done the same for crypto.

We have never had anyone breach our system, but many attacks. One of the attacks actually managed to shake up the amazon AWS shield, but nothing has breached out system or stolen from us.

Fortunately that's not how it works. If you look at the market cap of Bitcoin at $130 billion, and Celsius only holds $170 million, we are a small fraction of all the bitcoin. Even if we had 5% of all the bitcoin we would not dilute depositors. One big exchange like Binace or Bitfiniex uses more than all the coins Celsius has. There is no issue of demand. This is a huge market, the exchanges are using your coins to lend out and make money for themselves, Celsius is returning that value to the depositors.

The Inflection Point! It's a brilliant idea saying what happens when all the CEL token are in the app and Celsius still need to buy it from the market. Today Celsius is the largest buyer of CEL in the market. Today 40% of people are earning in CEL and that number is growing faster than the community itself! If you want to see how fast the community is growing, go to Celsians.com. Waseem will drop that link and you can see the amazing job johanaess and his team have done tracking the growth of celsius week over week. The growth of coins, members, depositors and see currently we are growing at about 3.7% week over week. This growth creates more users, which means we have to buy more and if there are more buyers than sellers, usually price goes up, and that's the whole point of the flywheel in the Celsius model. Nobody else has a model like us. BNB is close, but they only give you 20% of net profit while we give you 80% of total revenue.

Of course! You can buy me a beer without being a CELionaire haha.

Any day! Seriously! I am answering the last of their questions, they are being very diligent and we love that, but any day now. I know how important it is. Frankly we should be in the top 100 when we get listed properly.

Stop at one! Haha just kidding. Kids are the only legacy we leave behind. Everything else withers away, the only things that outlast you are your family. Each one is a unique experiment that will never be repeated again. I love every one of them even though sometimes they drive me crazy and it's very expensive to have kids in this world. Make sure to have enough money to pay their bills because this new generation…. They don't want to work, they want their parents to work for them!

A lot of people are promoting this idea, but I think we have already exhausted all of the people that are willing to hold their private keys and manage their own coins. So if you want Bitcoin to hit $1,000,000 but at the same time own your own keys, that's a dilemma. There is no reset for private keyes, the reason we created this beautiful interface is so that if you lose your password, lose your phone, you don't lose your private key. Our mission is to bring all of the people who are not technically capable of holding their keys. So again unlike nexo, we are fully compliant. As long as you follow the law, don't allow bad actors, and do chain analysis and don't do illegal stuff like operate in countries you are not allowed to operate in, no government is going to go after you. Today it was announced that Goldman Sachs is going to pay a $2 Billion dollar fine, the biggest ever, and admit guilt to breaking the law for money laundering. This is what KYC/AML is supposed to prevent, people coming in and doing all of this illegal stuff. These are the largest banks in the world doing it and they only got a slap on the wrist. $2 Billion is only a month of their earnings! If you are being fully compliant, the worst that is going to happen is a slap on the wrist. As far as hackers, if hackers come in there are many levels of protection, we have done several external audits, hired white hat hackers to test our systems, so we hired the best guys and use the best systems, firewalls, amazon shield, all of these different things to make sure you are fully protected. On top of that we use several custodians like Fireblocks and Bitgo and so on to keep the coins in hundreds of wallets. We also have developed an in-house fund to pay users first if there were ever a loss of coins. We socialize profits while others socialize losses. Call you bank and ask them to share their profits!

I don't have an off switch! I'm like this 24/7! Thank you to my wife Krissy for suffering with me all these years keeping up with me. I found a way to channel all of this passion and energy into something i'm excited about. We all need a purpose, finding a purpose to help millions of people is rare but an amazing thing. Doing good and doing well is the legacy I want to leave.

We were just listed on Ledger hard wallets which is nice, but we are working on a very secretive project version of DeFi where we operate off of hardware wallets. We are going to continue to add more capabilities and security into hardware wallets.

There are several people who claim to be the father, which would make me the grandfather! If you look at my patent for October 5th, 1994 you will see my patent for VOIP. A lot of people thought ethernet or other systems would be the winner, but I focused on VOIP and built the first gateway. After we showed AT&T this, the other systems started to migrate over to VOIP. I did hundreds of conferences for VOIP just like i'm now doing hundreds of conferences for MOIP, I have seen this movie before. It doesn't matter who invented it, it's about changing the lives of billions. It was very easy to convince people to switch from the phone companies when they were charging $3 a minute and you could use my app for free, the trust barrier was very low. With money, there is a much higher bar to overcome, and that is why its taking so much longer for crypto to take over. Just like we created the separation of church and state, we need to separate money and state. The technology is here and now.

It's the same as last years! Bring 100 Million people into crypto! I don't have any other thoughts on my mind. It's not an easy task, my VOIP patent just expired after 25 years, and now I am dedicating the next 25 years to bring the next 100 million people to crypto. It's going to take time. Banks use fractional reserve which creates massive leverage, when you withdraw $1 from Deutsche Bank they have to close $50 in loans. We the depositors have the power. Just like we switched from the phone companies to VOIP, we have the power to eliminate the banks by withdrawing our assets and giving them to someone that is acting in your best interest. We do not want to empower the banks who do not act in our best interest.

People don’t get how deep and big the revolution we are bringing into the world is. When I think about Celsius, I think about how the world will look like in 5 or 10 years. Just look at telecoms. Telecoms used to be bigger than banks, bigger than Google, bigger than anything. I certainly think banking won't disappear but it will be replaced by something else. I also don't think people understand decentralization correctly. It doesn't mean centralized companies will disappear, it means the power of centralized companies will be much weaker and the competition will be higher. In order to facilitate all that, you really need a system that is open and transparent and the users that hold the asset decide what to do what's best for them. At the end of the day they won't even need to decide, a machine will choose the best path for them to get the best result. In order to see Celsius play a part in this we have to keep our eye on the ball and not be stagnant. Not be another bank. We need to think about decentralization and what we are doing here.

You have to assume a company like us is always under scrutiny and rightfully you want to know that your funds are safe. You know, guys are looking. I am happy to say that my guys have done an amazing job not just being reactive to security, because security for me starts even before the first line of code. It’s the way you think about building software and encoding. Sometimes we were under attack, hackers were trying to hack us and there were DDOS attacks and we prevented anyone from feeling it. All in all we managed to fight these wars for you guys and more importantly we always learn and adapt, so we add more security. Behind the scenes we are doing a lot of work and I am very proud at what we have achieved.

Definitely something we want! We don't have thousands of engineers, so we have to choose what kind of products and features carefully because you have to support each one and put in a lot of TLC. It's on the roadmap, probably mid 2020.

Behind the scenes we are looking at DeFi, and looking at DeFi I see a few problems. First of all it requires a lot of trust to send all of your money to a smart contract. I think what will happen is that there will be an evolution. We have been working on something, that makes it so you don't have to transfer your funds anywhere and you will have your banking done from your wallet. We are internally testing to make sure the technology works and can be ready early next year. It's about crossing the chasm, we are at 4 million people in crypto and how do we cross to the 7 billion. How do we cross to the governments that are trying to control this thing? My opinion is if you do it through a wallet and through a smart contract from your wallet you can solve all of these problems and really provide banking to the unbanked and savings accounts to the unbanked or anyone really.

We were very busy with opening New York and other states, right behind that we have 3 features between now and the end of the year. One is changing the algorithm on how we do withdrawals and hopefully we can announce this as a feature by the end of the year.

If you read our whitepaper, we don't leverage or do any manipulation. We are fully collateralized, and I can tell you that the financial team is very busy making sure that we don't leverage or any trickery. We are working with Scott Storetta on a project to create a blockchain that even the banks may need to use one day. So that anyone can audit the financial stability and reserves of a financial institution, so this is one of our visions for Celsius and beyond.

A quantum computer can answer almost any question that regular computers can't. Its very special technology that most people cannot grasp. So quantum supremacy means that the first people that achieve a computer that can answer a question that no other computer can, that’s it. So Google claims they did that, they say their computer answered a question that would normally take 10,000 years. Why is it important for blockchain? Blockchain is based on hashing and cryptography and the worry is that a machine like that could break the code almost instantly. There are few technologies that are quantum safe, but you must consider evolution, Bitcoin now is not the same Bitcoin that satoshi invented. It has evolved much and there are 50 projects around Bitcoin now so I suspect blockchain will evolve to be quantum safe. The next thing is that quantum is still about 10 years away from being able to break blockchain cryptography. With all of the progress made in the last 10 years, who knows.

One of the features we are working on is the ability to purchase coins directly into the app. Think of it like a box with tools. Initially what we will do is enable one exchange probably coinbase, to transfer coins directly from your exchange account into your celsius wallet and back. Also enable buying coins and deposit directly into the app. We also have been cleared by our compliance to do coin swaps in the wallet. I'm excited about this because it's a great set of features that will allow us to enhance more and more.

When I started Celsius with Alex and Daniel the first thing we had to do was find developers. This was not something I could do alone, this requires a lot of expertise and a larger team. I found Militia and his team, he is well known as one of the best blockchain guys with 30 years of experience. During the ICO we had advisors that were like ninjas. I personally also love the young guys, bringing in fresh faces and a fresh approach to the team is amazing and some of my best hires were young guys right outside of university, 1 or 2 years of experience but are filled with passion. We recently hired Waseem for example who was in college and said “hey i'm going to drop out right now and i'm going to come work for you!” we have a great combination, a lot of adults in the room.

Yes, we are about to release another version. In 4.0 you didn't see it but there was a lot of work that went on under the hood. We used a platform called Expo that worked for us well at first, but then as we evolved and expanded we had to make a decision to move out of Expo. The version we released a couple of months ago was a complete rewrite and we are still having some things replaced. We are working on the app performance and it will improve. I really want to take January and February to jump improve the app.

Alex has been a New Yorker for the last 20 years and has 6 kids at home. If something were to happen to Alex the company would be just fine, I don't want to talk about practices and stuff but the company is not dependent on one guy, there is no one person who can take the money and run. I also have to say that Celsius by design does not have one big safe with all of the assets in it.

In ERC 20 you can define your token in many ways. There is something called minting coins which means I can create as many tokens as I want, and burn coins where you can destroy them. If you were someone like Binance, you can create as many BNB and burn as many BNB as you want, so there is a chance for manipulation. When we deployed the CEL token contract, by definition we made promises to our community and did not create a minting capability on CEL. You can look at the smart contract and see there is no minting capability, but there is a burn capability. You can see that we did burn about 5 million tokens after the ICO after we did some accounting, but it's a one way street, it's very scary. We had to be completely sure because there was no going back. So we can burn, but not mint.

I am a big fan of Stripe, it is a financial product that is very developer oriented and built as a financial tool, we are big fans of that. We actually are hiring a lead very soon to just deal with API and integrations. Right now we have a whole website just for it called developers.celsius.com. We have an API to allow companies to add the ability to make interest on your coins and we want to add a similar off the shelf API for lending and borrowing. We have big big plans for this and want to be much much more developer oriented company. I hope 2020 is the year for API.

There is a debate going on whether DAI is stable or not stable. I think for us the risk involved is what is it stable to? Is it Fiat currency or whatever? DAI is based on ethereum as collateral and 50 people voting on how to balance it. I'm not a big expert on DAI but when we consider the return on a coin we have to think about these risks. Our CFO is great at gauging returns. At the end of the day the interest you receive is 80% of revenue so if DAI is 8% we are making 10% on it, either by lending or doing something else. We get 10% return and give 8% back to you guys. This is not something Alex just makes up. We look at all the numbers and make sure we give back at least 80% of our revenues

I've talked about it a little bit, im a big believer in DeFi and what we are building called MeFi so I think a lot of Celsius activities will be done from hardware wallets in 10 years. A lot of the mobile devices are coming with blockchain wallets built in so we have to plan for that and it's going to be exciting and hopefully this year we have some more news. Like all things in this space, its very experimental and we don't really know and we are looking at the equivalent of 1992 and trying to see what an Iphone looks like but I think we have some glimpses of what things may look like with new technologies that we are very excited about!

So we have to seperate what crypto is. Is it a good payment system? Not right now, there are a few good projects but to become a payment mechanism fiat is not going away any time soon, you have to pay for clothing for food and whatever in dollars. The tech itself is not good and it will take awhile to catch up. I think what will happen, again, not a lot of people understand, but we are building a financial infrastructure. I think that crypto is going to operate in the background like TCPIP of the internet and people will use it to buy clothes and buy whatever. There will be some sort of bridge with google pay or some card. All money is digital but we need to build the bridges.

We have had that discussion, yes, why not? If we discover a system that works for the benefit of the community that is not greedy, why not expand beyond crypto? Right now it's just talk with no plan but why not?

It's complicated, I can tell you for example. When you build a portfolio of lets say 10 BTC. Before you take a loan, we invest those BTC for you so we can pay you 80%, when we give you a loan, that crypto is locked for your account, you don't earn interest on that collateral so it doesn't really go anywhere and it stays in our system. It just makes up for the money we lend you, we don't have to pay interest on that collateral. It kind of makes sense it's not that complicated really. How are we so successful? With money and paid more interest than all of our competitors combined? When Alex talks about working for the community and putting the user first and building trust and transparency it's not just salesperson talk. Its 60 people that have a mission. If a competitor hears that and says that a good thing “Lets work for the benefit of the community and give them 20% of our profits” they have missed the point. That won't work, if you want to compete with us you have to fully go for these things and truly work for the benefit of the community.

Just download the app and signup!

We are not huge fans of debit/credit cards. It would be an easy way to turn loans into spendable cash, so maybe later on in 2020 we will put out something.

A: There is a calculator in the app that we added in the last update that will tell you exactly how much you need. If you need any help with it, feel free to contact support at App@Celsius.network for more assistance

Very similar! Back when I was younger, when you made money you had a choice to lock it for a period of time and earn up to 10% interest on it. In 2008 when the banks got bailed out by the government they discovered something interesting. They found out that people will continue to work with them even if they don't pay that interest. So in 2009 after receiving all of the bailout money they paid the largest bonuses ever. Look, I don't hate the banks, they make a lot of money and that is their business model. We have had to continue to work with them because to date, there is no other financial system to migrate to. Capitalism is great, we just need fair capitalism. Right now the system is ugly, unfair, and controlled by governments and large corporations. We have an opportunity to create a more fair, and just system that anyone can use.

In the late 90s there was a huge group of people thinking they were going to get rich by learning how to code, but like all things, you have to have a passion to code if you want to be successful. You have to be a builder, its like an art. Software languages are just a tool like what screwdriver you need to build something. If you have the passion for coding and love to build stuff then who knows, you can change anything. Today it is so much easier with all of the free resources online to teach you

No, age! I save money on barbers this way!

We have about 25 developers is serbia, a few product managers in Israel, all in all, around 30 people.

The first thing we need is a custodian to support the coin, then we can put it in the coming soon section which says we can support it, it has volume, and we are able to generate revenue. Before adding it officially we want to be certain we can make money with it.

There are no similarities.

As the CTO I always need to look at what is behind the corner, what are the dangers. The way I look at these dangers is who can shut you down. Compliance and regulators are the biggest. We have paid lawyers a lot of money to get guidance, and sometimes they don't know but you have to show you are trying to do the right thing and trying to be compliant. We are choosing to play by the rules and have been very diligent. The other thing is security, this is something I always talk about. How we treat code, assets, everything is very security conscious. Number three would maybe be natural disaster? Haha we are geologically diverse with offices all over the world.

We recently did another audit. Part of it encourages by the Celsians community! If you look at the whiltepaper, we modeled what we stated in there. You can look at the website and directly on the blockchain to see exactly how many and where the token are and what each wallet means.

Hahaha soon soon! We have talked with a company about this, we need to work out the fees but yes we will be able to do that!

As I started, this not a Mashinsky only operation here, there are a lot of passionate people working day and night answering your concerns and building the future. Scaling is very hard but we have been growing very smartly. There are many issues we encounter like how to market, lend, and pay our users. Most of the other competition is only doing one or two things, while we are developing the entire flywheel. The most challenging thing to do was create this platform intelligently, this is a marathon not a sprint.

Everything we do is for the community. 80% of everything we earn goes back to the community. No one else does that, NEXO, BlockFi, … We invented this whole idea of paying interest on crypto. During the last 2 years we have created a new system that acts in your best interest, so everything we do, everything we build is for you, to make it better and easier for you to live your life, pay your bills and actually have your money work for you instead of you working for your money.

The CEL token is part of the Celsius flywheel. Our users deposit coins, we put them to work to produce income & distribute the income every monday. 48% of our community elected to earn their interest in CEL, because they believe in the value of the 7 CEL utilities & we have to buy those CEL for them every week on exchanges. The bigger our community, the more we earn, the more CEL we need to buy every week. Check Celsians.com to track our growth & if we’re on track to achieve our goal of bringing the next 100 million people into crypto.

Yes, we are planning to announce a few listings. We want to make CEL accessible to as many users as possible.

The interest comes from lending assets to exchanges & hedge funds, who need to borrow those assets to perform their main functions, for example offering leverage trading to their customers. When you put your coins on exchanges, they take your coins to earn money and keep all the profits they make on their own. Celsius takes all that profit and gives 80% of it back to the depositors. The more assets we extract from exchanges, the more interest we can charge them.

If we can create a card that is better than anything out there, yes. First we need a larger community to deliver products like 5% cash back that deposits directly into your celsius wallet to earn interest.

We are doing everything to be fully transparent. The financial system as it is designed today sucks wealth from the little guy. We have designed a system that works for you. Check everything we say: Do we have the deposits? Do we earn the interest? Do we distribute to our users? What are users saying? What are vendors saying? Look at the letter from our custodian BitGo we published. Starting this week we are publishing the wallets into which we will put all the earnings. Full transparency, because we have nothing to hide.

If Celsius gets hacked, that means Bitgo got hacked and their cold wallets are covered by $100 million insurance per account, which we have over 100. At the same time we operate our hot wallets with Fireblocks, who are also insured. Trusting Celsius gives you access to the best security in the industry, you get the BitGo custody for free, we pay the fee!

I don’t have an off switch! I am like this 24/7, you are lucky you are not married to me. That’s why I have 6 kids and this is my eighth company. I ran a public company just before Celsius with 1500 employees and $400 million in revenues, making millions of dollars and I walked away from all of that to give my kids and your kids a financial future. I disrupted several industries with VOIP starting 1994 and we are building MOIP to replace the toll collectors that suck all the profits from us with institutions that acts in your best interest. My dream is to die and have Celsius have hundreds of millions or billions of users who are living their lives because the system is creating a financial freedom for you, having your money work for you instead of you working for your money.

During a recession there will be more and more people concerned about doomsday and BTC will most likely go up in value as people see it as a doomsday insurance. But my vision of enabling crypto currencies is not relying on this scenario. If we enable people to earn a real return on their assets, then we don’t need a doomsday to create value.

The US is passing more and more strict regulations around crypto currencies. It’s a good and a bad thing. We want regulatory clarity so we can operate. Celsius is a Delaware C-Corp, we filed a REG D with the SEC and are registered with FINCEN and now applying for licenses in all the different states. While regulations tighten, we are already cleared to pay BTC on BTC and CEL on CEL but there is still regulatory uncertainty on our ability to pay CEL on BTC.

Internship? Very easy! Send us your resume to kristen@celsius.network! You can get all of the swag. We believe in paying people for their hard work. Sign up to be a part time ambassador to give it a try!

You can pay bills today using CELpay! Especially to people who do not have wallets. You can take any of your 25 coins and send it to anyone who accepts crypto via WhatsApp or email. Going forward, the next version of the app will enable you to purchase and pay things using your dollars.

We are going to add the ability to pull out interest first in the next release & compounding interest will soon follow in january or february 2020 but not sure if we’ll do it on all the coins. We already pay almost everything we can, so compounding comes effectively out of Celsius, which means we have to publish lower rates. Look, competitors may use the word compounding, but since they are not earning anything they can’t pompound anything and use investors money to subsidizing the rates. That won’t last forever, there is no free lunch.

It’s a simple question: Can we earn yield on the coin? Every coin we have in the wallet is a coin where there’s borrowing demand or it’s a staking coin so we can earn yield on it and distribute it to the community. We will be adding many more yielding assets in the future.

Our borrowers are round about 12 exchanges and 150 institutions with at least $10 million in assets. We monitor their ability to return those coins to us and they give us collateral. We also have retail borrowers that take dollar and stablecoin loans.

We minted 695 million CEL tokens, there will never be more. Audit us on the blockchain and also take a look at how many CEL we are purchasing every week to pay the weekly interest and how this shrinks the circulating supply.

Yes. It’s always your coins and we are paying interest on top of it. If you deposit 1 BTC you will always get 1 BTC back plus interest.

No, we will leave that for the banks. We are here to help the crypto community, the disadvantaged, the people who don’t have access to good financial services, the people who want to help us build this financial future.

Yes, once we can find one that is reliable enough and we feel it’s safe for our users.

Yes we have plans, but we will only do so if we can do it in a way that allows the whole community to participate.

Yes, we already do effectively the same things that DeFi projects do and we are working on amazing stuff that will vastly improve from what the current DeFi movement achieved until today. And in the meantime, audit us, we believe that our transparency is actually higher than most other projects.

The yield on CEL is an indication of how well Celsius is doing. If we are paying more on CEL token, that means we are earning more and so we are distributing more.

In the crypto space the US is going to exhaust all of the other possibilities before they do the right thing. Regulation is providing us more clarity, but a the same time, more restrictions.

We did everything in a compliant way and followed all the suggestions of the lawyers, but there is still a lack of clarity in this space. We have four people working on compliance at all times to make sure we follow all of the rules, all of the time.

Our main competitors are the banks. Millions of people are giving their money to the bank for free while they charge us 24% a year on credit cards. In the last 12 months, Americans have paid $164 Billion to the banks just in interest! We are changing the system so that when someone takes a loan they only pay 9% and we return 7% back to the community. This allows our community to keep the profits, not the banks!

I love Wyoming! The fresh air, the plains, the mountains. Maybe after 100 million users.

FIAT ON ramp is coming before January 1st 2020! You can also withdraw $50K today and we’ll soon make it unlimited. Deposit $10 million in the morning and take it out in the afternoon! Our solution is aimed at the next 100 Million people.

No! A bank is a broken institution. We want to Unbank everyone. A bank is a 700 year old sausage, would you want to eat it?

No, our success or failure has nothing to do with Alex being around. It’s all about growing the network. We have 65 people working on this and they are doing an amazing job. As long as we keep earning yield on crypto Celsius will continue to grow.

We publish the HODL ratio meaning how many tokens we pay as interest vs how many have been sold. Right now the ratio is at 93% meaning 93% of CEL tokens we have distributed as interest are being HODLed. There are very few people selling their CEL interest so we don’t see it as a problem. CEL price has been affected negatively by a number of ICO sellers. Over the next 3 months we will be purchasing an additional 10 BTC and 600 ETH of CEL from several exchanges. We will be doing this in a fully transparent way and have already published all of the addresses associated with the buybacks.

Haha, I wasn’t born in the US so I cannot be president. But seriously, you cannot get anything done in politics. If you think they wake up and work for you, you are kidding yourself.

Does Uber have a desktop version? Today money is dynamic and stays with you on your phone. We want to concentrate our development on our top products that we do best.

Yes! We have acquired a company and are looking at more now. When we see a team that has the same spirit and passion we want them to join us!

No, We are HODLers and don’t encourage selling. We want to help you earn interest so you don’t sell We want people to create a nest egg. The dream is to earn so much money on our money that we don’t have to work for money anymore. The goal is to get your money to earn you money.

The only reason we ask so many questions is to be compliant. We have to report to the IRS through a 1099 to show how much interest we paid you in the US for Tax and compliance reasons.

We will have 100 million users! We don’t plan to do too much more. Our job is not to add more and more, its to make it easier and easier to earn on your money and protect yourself from the US dollar.

It has already happened! Celsius started when Bitcoin was at $14k, then it fell to $3.500 and then back up to $14k. We have tested Celsius under all conditions. What you want, what investors want is a non correlated asset, Bitcoin is that asset and we allow you to earn interest on it.

What do you look for in a job candidate?

New York? I live in New York. I love New York! We will be launching here next week! If you want to be a beta tester please email us! We will have a general launch probably in January.

We just announced $4.25 Billion in loans! How can this be? All of this success is due to you guys, that decided to trust us, but the job isn’t done. We need to bring many more people into the system. Use CELpay to send crypto to your family or friends and grow the community.