Celsius, a community-based borrowing and lending platform, aims to put members’ interests as the priority instead of profits. They are creating new financial products with the aim of achieving this goal.
In the current financial world, banks and other money lending institutions charge far more in loan interest than they return to customers in deposit interest (even on dedicated ‘high interest’ savings accounts). But with this being the established model, there really is no other choice for both borrowers and savers but to accept the de facto rule of the banks.
Celsius is looking to redress this relationship and return more control to customers. Their mission statement is ‘for crypto to continue to spread and gain traction we’ve got to bring the next 100 mln people into the crypto community. In order to do that, real products built by real teams have to provide real utility to the public.’
The white paper sets their goals out in simple terms- deposit coins, borrow cash against your cryptocurrency, earn interest. Celsius will allow customers to use their Celsius Wallet to use crypto tokens as collateral for fiat currency loans (dollars). It will also enable them, in the future, to lend crypto to earn interest on deposited coins. Celsius predicts this could be up to nine percent annual interest once the platform is fully launched. The aim is to allow customers who need loans in USD to obtain them using their crypto holdings without having to sell them.
Celsius specific tokens (CEL) are already available in the presale and the full crowdsale launches on March 15th, running until the 22nd. CEL are ERC20 tokens and possession of them allows holders to be part of the Celsius community and apply for dollar loans. As mentioned, further future utilities such as lending crypto for earning interest are to be rolled out as the platform expands and develops.
The Celsius roadmap sets out plans to expand beyond accepting just the top 20 cryptocurrencies for deposit into the Celsius wallet. The first USD loans will be offered later this year, and users can begin to generate interest on loans by Q4.
“We want to be as inclusive as possible and our goal is to be one of the first killer apps for crypto, available to members across the world who may or may not currently have access to credit,” CEO Alex Mashinsky told Cointelegraph about the end goal for Celsius.
Alex Mashinsky, who worked on developing Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) in the 1990s, helped enable the first voice calls over the Internet. Now he is working on Money Over Internet Protocol (MOIP) and has received numerous tech and innovation awards over his career. In one of his promotional videos explaining the vision of Celsius, he describes how he wants to take away the unfair advantage from world financial powers: ‘If we look at the top 20 coins, there’s a whole world of financial products that derive from these coins… what Celsius does is bring community members together and we will issue these products, instead of Wall Street, on behalf of coin holders. Billions of dollars will go back to the coin holding community plus extra income from the byproducts.’
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