Mashinsky, how does the bank even pay people 1%?” a curious reader may ask. Today, people assume that just because a bank pays them 1% in interest, no one can beat the bank.” “People said it was impossible to offer cheaper services than AT&T. “Back when I made VoIP in the ‘90s, we were able to offer the service for a fifth of the price,” says Mashinsky. At least, that’s what the Celsius ethos argues. However, too good to be true may carry less weight in a paradigm that is already significantly skewed against your best interests. The expression If it’s too good to be true, it probably is… is built on multi-generation experiences of disappointments, trickery, and usually a guy with a bleached smile, an expensive suit, and $100 haircut. Rarely does one visit appealing financial opportunities without a healthy dose of incredulity or skepticism. Fast-forward to today, Celsius is celebrating a few more material milestones– a 53.5k BTC (about $513,600,000) deposit milestone, over 100,000 users, close to $1B worth of deposits.įor this interview, we pair Alex on Alex: CoinCentral’s Moskov and Celsius’s Mashinsky.Įditor’s note: be sure to check out our guide on the Celsius Platform for a deeper dive.Ĭhallenging the Status Queue with Blockchain: Investment Bank Edition They’re focused on returning profits to shareholders, not interest to depositors, the two directly conflict.ĬoinCentral’s Steven Buchko first interviewed Alex back in 2018, when Celsius was in the middle of launching its app. “If they cared about their customers, the banks could also be paying 9% as we do. “ What most people are missing is what the banks are telling their investors how they earn 15-18% on their depositors’ money every quarter,” Alex starts. How Celsius is able to accomplish this in crypto interest accounts, however, requires peeling back the layers of the onion of finance, which Alex has helped masterfully do so in this article. With crypto interest account in their nascent stages, Celsius has demonstrated potential.Īt face value, the concept is easy to understand: Users deposit any amount of a variety of digital assets and earn an annual interest rate upwards of 11%– a stark comparison to traditional bank savings accounts, which offer anywhere between. The core similarity between these exits is that the companies built a monopolistic hold in their industries and utilized groundbreaking technology to pioneer business models assumed to be impossible.įor example, by inventing VoIP (voice of IP) in the early 2000s, Alex has helped over one billion people bypass telecommunications monopolies by using voice over the Internet for free.Ĭomparatively, Celsius aims to bring 7.5 billion people from the traditional world of interest-bearing accounts into cryptocurrency, currently with one Celsius user at a time.
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He’s also made around 120 VC investments, holds 34 patents, raised over a billion dollars, and has achieved over $3 billion in exits.Īlex is on his eighth startup company as a founder, and two of his companies, Arbinet and Transit Wireless are two of New York’s biggest venture-backed exits ever, with exits of $750M and $1.2B respectively. Investment banks are thriving despite bustling fintech startup activity and looming economic threats–JP Morgan celebrated its most profitable year ever in 2019 with a record $36.4 billion in net income, a bulk of which came from a very important strategy called Security (Sec) Lending– we’ll get into that soon enough.Īlex knows a thing or two about building strategically valuable companies. “Celsius is going after all the money in the world,” says Alex Mashinsky, the Founder of Celsius, who plans to make more than just a dent. Alex Mashinsky and Celsius may actually do it with cryptocurrency interest accounts.
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Countless fintech entrepreneurs have aimed their scopes at the marble columns on high finance and fired out thousands of business ideas to disrupt it, but none have yet to make a dent.