Could Celsius' CEL Token Be Warming Up Too?
"Centralised Finance"
Ever since @chekohler brought Celsius and Centralised Finance (CeFi) to my attention, I've been diving in to this more as the idea of it is really growing on me. I mentioned in yesterday's post about how CeFi could be the "bridge" that keeps the essence of familiarity of your high street banking apps but merges it with cryptocurrency without really needing too much knowledge about blockchain technology itself.
Effectively, you just deposit your crypto in to the Celsius app and a week later, you get an interest payment on your holdings. This interest then is added to your holdings and so the following Monday, you get interest payment on the whole amount in what's also known as "compound interest". The downside of course is you're not in custody of your crypto and you're trusting the company stays honest and afloat. However, Celsius' assets have grown over $2.2 billion recently in less than 2 years so I think they'll be around for a while - seems they also have some insurance coverage from BitGo but full Terms and Conditions of their service are here!
CEL Token
CEL is an additional token from Celsius that you can buy and holding more of in the app itself. The more CEL you have in your portfolio, the bigger the bonus you receive on top of your interest earnings. You don't have to have any CEL if you don't want to but you after seeing these delicious interest rate bonuses you receive if you hold more, it might be worth doing (screenshot below from my Celsius phone app):
So you can see that there is a buying demand for the CEL token as it gives you better bonuses. Not only that but as you add more non-CEL crypto to your portfolio, you need to then buy more CEL to keep your CEL % up in the relevant membership zone. You can choose to earn your interest payouts in CEL if you didn't want to buy it outright but it seems the demand for the token is heating up due to these mechanics too - check out the price chart below from the last 3 months:
Not a bad increase I'd say and the coin is ranked #33 with a market cap of $756 million as of 17th November 2020. The good thing is that you even earn 5% interest on CEL for holding it too so even more reasons to have it in your Celsius app!
Buying CEL
So I was looking around at where you can buy CEL and it seems that our mate Uniswap is the most popular and easy place to get it. You'll need to set up Metamask in your Brave/Chrome browser, put some ETH in to the Metamask wallet, then search for CEL in Uniswap, enter the amount you want to buy and confirm the amount:
This is the cheapest way I found of doing it. If you do it through the Celsius app, you will lose out on fees for paying by card and as you know, I try to cut costs when buying crypto! For example, £100 of CEL through Celsius gives you 75 CEL, do it through Uniswap, you get 83 (at time of posting earlier today).
Then you send this from your Metamask to your CEL wallet in the Celsius app and sit back, relax, let the tokens work for you!
Hodler's Approach
Although it's not the sexiest way to go about crypto, hodling works well for me and I like low stresse and the compound interest appeals to my long term saver mindset. This, coupled with the daily micro-buys, is all working towards my own goals I've set with finances. Particularly with Bitcoin rallying hard and all the institutional investment coming in, is anyone else suddenly feeling very excited about things?
I saw the chart above which looks like it is a list of Bitcoin Treasuries in publicly traded and private companies and, if it's accurate, look at how much has been bought over the last 12 months - getting close to a million BTC across many companies, valued at about $14.6 billion! I think we'll be seeing a big change in the next decade to where we are now and the narrative behind Bitcoin and crypto, what do you think?!
What are your thoughts on Celsius and CEL? Is it too hot to handle or do you have cold feet about custodial crypto services? What do you make of these Bitcoin Treasuries? Let me know in the comments below!
Take care
Nicky
Referral link for Celsius
- Sign up with the invite link
- Deposit and buy $200 worth of BTC
- We both get $20 of BTC
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So you telling me even someone on benefits can start stacking Sats? Just quit smoking take your ciggy money stack Sats or if you like Gross British Pounds and get some cellies
I still think CEL needs more about it than HODL’ung to get preferred interest rates I’d like to see better cash back rewards when you purchase in the app and when you send cash between other cel members the system still feels too closed at the moment
I’d love a CEL card too if they said stake CEL and get a card I’d be down for that
Hahaha! "Stop Smoking, Start Stacking"? Those are the kind of warnings they should be putting on those packets!
I'm happy enough at the moment with the interest rates from CEL but I wonder if they have more in the pipeline - the app at least is far less buggy than it was a couple of weeks ago, that was starting to give the right hump! Yeah reducing fees for being a Platinum member would be pretty sweet.
Yeah a CEL card would be pretty slick actually! They have those weekly AMA's with the CEO so might be worth throwing some ideas out - not attended one of those yet so might be worth doing.
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That's interesting - I think @felander has been stacking CEL for a while, I use his referral code btw, sorry he beat you too it!
You just reminded me I might change my pay-out options!
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Aha, no worries, as long as you are also benefiting from holding on Celsius then that's the main thing! You're going on Luno at the end of the month right? ;)
Yeah I am using that Mickey Mouse tGBP to earn payouts in CEL now, which has gone up to 13% so that's pretty cool! Will still earn BTC in sats at the 4.5% but the option is there to go up to 5.6% interest if I earn in CEL... options options!
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And if BTC does mass adopt, it wouldn't surprise me if it's centralised finance that does very well, rather than decentralised financed!
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Yeah I do think that CeFi has got the best chance to help "transition" people to crypto. Nothing much is needed other than going through account setup and sending BTC there. Once people have dipped their toes in with CeFi for a few months and seeing the possibility then they might want to go ankle deep with other things but for now, CeFi a nice bridge.
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Oh one question (this is how you appear on the comments leaderboard btw!) - I take it those bonuses are 5-30% of the standard interest rate, so if my earnings are 4.5% in BT and extra 30% is going to take that to around 6%
Is that about right?
Actually, near enough exactly from 4.5% to 6%.
That's pretty good for a long term hodl rate!
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Haha, thanks for the inside information :P
From what I gather those bonuses are only applied if you choose to earn your rewards in CEL. So if you still decided to earn in BTC, you will keep the interest rate of 4.5% but if you earn in CEL, you'd get about 6%.
Still pretty good IMO but I'm just looking to earn BTC in sats, the rest in CEL to get to Platinum... I mean, I could just buy another few CEL tokens to be fair if I was impatient... which I am now when talking about it haha!
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