Celsius Targets New Users With Tokenized Gold and Commodities

In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, Alex Mashinsky, the chief executive of decentralized finance, or DeFi, platform Celsius, and an inventor of the voice-over-internet-protocol, or VOIP, discussed the platform’s recent introduction of support for Tether Gold, or XAUT.

Mashinksy described its support for tokenized gold as offering a bridge for users from the fiat currency into non-correlated and decentralized assets.

Celsius adds gold support

“For the first time in history, gold is earning interest in gold,” Mashinsky stated. “Every week we give you a small nugget of gold on top of the gold you already own, in gold.”

“That's never existed in history,” he continued. “Every time you bought gold, you had expenses, you had storage fees and insurance fees, or funds fee - fee, upon fee, upon fee. We have a positive yield of three or four percent per year.”

With the addition of gold, Machinsky stated that that Celsius now provides support for a non-correlated asset that is stable — offering a bridge for users who may not yet be interested in crypto assets but are interested in moving out of fiat currency and non-correlated non-correlated assets.

“Most people have close to 100% of their assets denominated in their local currency. So they have real estate, they have bonds, stock, whatever,” he said.

“They hold all of those things in one basket, they just don’t realize it's one basket. They have either zero or close to zero uncorrelated assets.”

“I think everyone should have two to five percent of their portfolio in [non-correlated assets] as an insurance against debasement,” he added.

Celsius to expand commodity offerings

Looking forward, Mashinsky stated that Celsius wants to add support for other tokenized non-correlated assets and commodities.

“I really want to add silver, maybe even a few commodities if we can tokenize them and generate yield. We want that unique combination of non-correlation and yield, and I think if we have a broad enough portfolio that is going to enable many more people to join,” he added.

“Maybe even older folks may join just because they want gold. They might never touch the Bitcoin side of it, but, if you have all the options, then you really expand the community and all these people are in the digital assets market.”

He concluded saying: “Some of them might not even realize that they are in the digital asset market, but I think that is an opportunity for us.”