The crypto lending platform also distributed more than $80 million in crypto rewards to the Celsius community
Crypto lending platform, Celsius, announced yesterday that it had more than doubled its net crypto holdings in just six months. After becoming the first crypto platform to surpass $1 billion in total assets under management (AUM) earlier this year, yesterday’s press release reported that that figure had more than doubled to over $2.2 billion.
Celsius allows users to earn up to 21.49% APY on over 40 different coins — including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and to borrow dollars and stablecoins with loans starting at 1% APR. Their rewards program means that the highest returns and lowest borrowing rates are only available to those with at least 15% of their holdings in CEL and who choose to be paid in CEL, the Celsius Network’s native token.
Yesterday’s announcement boasted other recent achievements such as surpassing 215,000 active users worldwide, distributing more than $80 million worth of crypto rewards to the Celsius community and building a balance sheet which is now over $680 million, excluding AUM.
CEO of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky, commented “Our incredible growth not just during the last year, but since Celsius was launched just over two years ago, proves that as we predicted, interest income is the new killer app for crypto. We created the concept of earning yield on your digital assets in kind or with a native token and launched the DeFi revolution. Since then we have created more income for our customers than any one else in DeFi or CeFi, and we have no plans on slowing down any time soon.”
Mashinsky, who won the Albert Einstein Technology Medal in 2000, has an impressive track record: as well as developing the Voice over Internet Protocol, he founded Arbinet and Transit Wireless (which installed Wi-Fi on the New York subway); two of New York’s top 10 biggest venture-backed exits since 2000.
Celsius believes this dramatic growth is a result of its community-centric model, which sees it distribute up to 80% of its total revenue back to its customers. Over 40% of these customers choose to earn their interest in CEL, meaning that Celsius is actually the biggest buyer of CEL tokens, and all those market buys restricting the circulating supply should be good for token price. Indeed, Celsius reported their token is up over 4,529% in the past year.