Celsius Network doubles its holdings in six months, reaching $2.2B

Cryptocurrency lending and interest-earning service Celsius Network has doubled its assets under management (AUM) in just six months.

According to a Nov. 9 announcement, Celsius’ AUM just surpassed $2.2 billion—after the firm reportedly became the first crypto platform to surpass $1 billion in total assets under management earlier this year. The firm’s CEO Alex Mashinsky said that this growth proves that “interest income is the new killer app for crypto” and continued:

“We created the concept of earning yield on your digital assets in kind or with a native token and launched the DeFi [decentralized finance] 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.”

Celsius Network competitor BlockFi claimed in August that it surpassed $1.5 billion in assets under management at the time. Compound—a decentralized competitor to both the companies—has said its algorithms manage $1.32 billion of locked assets as of press time, according to DeFi data service DeFi Pulse.

In the announcement, Celsius claims that its service now also counts more than 215,000 active users worldwide, over $80 million in distributed crypto rewards, and over $860 million on the firm’s balance sheet—excluding AUM. Furthermore, the company notes that its proprietary CEL token is up over 4,529% over the past year (although according to CoinMarketCap data it grew by just about 3,631%).

Celsius believes that it achieved such growth by providing up to 80% of its total revenue back to its customers. In the firm’s wallet mobile application, customers can earn an annual percentage yield as high as 15% on their deposit on over 40 crypto assets, with interest being paid each week.

Users looking to use their crypto holdings as collateral can also leverage Celsius to borrow dollars or stablecoins at what the firm claims to be the lowest rates in the industry. Furthermore, such customers also earn rewards in-kind or in CEL tokens for using the loan service.

The crypto lending space is seemingly attracting increasingly more and more attention. As Modern Consensus reported in late August, BlockFi raised $50 million in a funding round led by the likes of Morgan Creek Digital and Winklevoss Capital. In September, BlockFi was also named to CBInsights’ list of the top 250 fintech brands of 2020.