We are live. Happy New Year.
Yeah. Wait, wait. We're not ready.
Oh my god. What a year. Come. Come. We had quite a year. You saw the gamer, but you didn't see the Mandalorian. Here. Come. Mandalorian. Come. They want to see you over here. Come. Come. Jordan last week, and Ethan is our Mandalorian. And guess what? Guess what we got? We got a thank-you card from Darth Vader himself. Look, look, Darth Vader sent us a card saying you are the chosen one. You see? So Darth Vader is watching our show, if you guys didn't know about it. Okay, thank you. Yeah, you did great. You did great. Here, give me five. You did great. You're a star. You're a board star. Okay, good. Now you're off the show.
So, uh, fantastic. Even Darth Vader had to recognize the gains.
Yeah. No, Darth Vader is a big fan of Celsius, you know. What can I tell you? Thank you. So, we had quite a year, 2020. A lot of you, I'm sure, are very, very happy that it's over considering all the stuff that's happening with corona and unemployment and all of the suffering that we're going through. But here we are, first day of the new year again. Bitcoin hit an all-time high. CEL token hit an all-time high last week. We can't really complain about anything. I think all of us, knock on wood, if we are staying safe, staying away from corona, if you didn't party too hard last night and help spread the corona, then you're doing good. I barely leave this apartment. I'm waiting for my injection. When I get it, then I'm going to go out and meet people. Until then, I'm pretty much on lockdown, not traveling anywhere and not kissing anybody. All right.
Exactly. Just HODL your kisses. Okay.
HODL your kisses. HODL everything.
Right. All right. So, a few things to talk about. We have a really exciting show. We're going to do a new segment today, which is rapid fire, where we kind of take all the questions.
Yeah. Zach has I think 20 of them already lined up, but we're going to basically make sure that we cover all your questions. So, normal Q&A and then rapid fire. All right.
So, what is so different in this economy, right? In this economy, we've had recessions before, we've had troubles before, but this time it's different. And this is the first time ever that I remember, I mean even if you go back 50 years, where we had a services recession. Almost every recession, if you go back, you would see that it was mostly related to either manufacturing or real estate or the internet boom or whatever. It was never the services economy, which is 70% of the US economy, never had a recession. I mean, it's kind of always chugging along doing very, very well. So the pandemic is the first time that the majority of the US economy got hit really, really bad, right? Because you go to the movies, you take an Uber, you go and do your nails or whatever—not me obviously, but I've never done my nails, they come naturally beautiful.
My point is all these things are services, and when you have a pandemic or anything like that, then basically those things get hit really, really bad. That's why the Fed and the government have basically pulled out all the stops to try to maintain the service economy and the whole economy until things come back, right? And obviously it's taking much longer. We had several waves of corona. We had several waves of basically recession getting deeper and deeper. And if you could borrow money from the government, great. The banks gave you money. You're surviving, right? The people who can take on more debt are doing just fine. The people who are not are not. And Zach was showing a testimonial today, right, from somebody who without Celsius probably would not have made it.
We've already hit a thousand viewers. We have a thousand live viewers right now. The audience is exploding. Please, please like and share. We're trying to hit 30,000 on our YouTube channel. Get this out to everybody you can. I mean, we're going to be covering a lot of updates today, and a lot of excitement coming in 2021.
Yes. And thanks, guys. I mean, last week was a record week on all fronts.
Over $312 million in deposits, which is probably double what we normally get. Also signups. We'll get a live update on how many signups, but it's at least double our normal signups just last week, right? So definitely we're seeing a huge acceleration. We already had seen an acceleration with CEL and so on. Obviously Celsius is just flying high, but now it's going even faster. I'll share some stuff with you guys also, but let me start with just finishing the update. Just one sec.
Yesterday there was a 24-hour livestream going on. Some of the community members organized this and it was really a fantastic show. They went the distance. A bunch of people from the company went on: Alex, Harumi, Nuke, myself, Wasim—a ton of people dropped in. It was a great effort. We had a lot of fun, great educational content. Our community is our best asset. We love you guys. You're the ones that are making this happen. And those last three days, Alex, we had I think it was 1,600, then 1,800, then another thousand active users. So, just something hit, right? Something blew up over the last week.
Yeah, I think you're talking about net depositors, but signups are much higher than that. One day I saw over 4,000 new subscribers just in one day.
Going back to the 2020 recession, I just want to finish that point that the services economy, when it gets hit, it recovers much slower, right? It's going to take us a while to go back to normal. So for all of the people out there, when you watch TV and they are telling you everything is going to be wonderful, the minute everybody gets a shot we're going to go back to normal—no, that's not what's going to happen. Again, Wall Street, the stock market, is completely disconnected. It's like a cloud floating out there. It has no relation to what's actually happening on the street to the average person. That's because there is seven times more money if you look at M1, which is the money supply. Just Google that, you will see that during this last year, basically 2020, we flooded the markets with seven times more money than we've ever done. You look at any other recession and you'll see that the amount of support that was given is seven times greater than what it was before.
So what does it mean? It means that your dollar is getting devalued, right? So let's look at—I'm going to share my screen here and just walk you through some of the impact of what this stuff does. So you can see my screen now?
All right, good. So this is again a chart that compares gold to the currencies that you know, and gold is the bar here, the straight bar, just kind of like the steady state, the stablecoin if you want to call it. You can see in red, this is the Japanese yen. So World War II obviously took a huge hit on Japan. They lost the war, and basically their currency never recovered since, right? Lost 90-something percent of its value from where it was when it was pegged to gold.
We went off the gold standard in 1971. So right here, you can see what happened. The dollar immediately started losing value as we basically printed more and more money, went through several recessions, and we are about to fall off a cliff. That hasn't happened yet, again compared to gold, right?
You may have seen articles of me talking about how dollars are going to lose 90% of their value and so on. Sorry, I got my slides here in the wrong order, but the point is that—let's see if it's this one. Yeah, "Dollar to lose 99% of its value." That's what I'm saying, right?
So I brought some examples for you, right? Zimbabwe is a country in Africa that had the strongest currency in Africa. One Zimbabwean dollar used to be worth more than one US dollar, right? So the exchange rate used to be you would get more than $1 when you exchange a Zimbabwean dollar to a dollar. And then they basically started doing what we're going through, right? As you know, if you have ever seen these bills, this is a 10 billion Zimbabwean dollar bill, right? And this could barely buy you a loaf of bread, right?
When you go 10 billion, look at these zeros, right? And they didn't even stop there. If you thought that this was bad, guess what? Then they came up with a new bill that was a 20 trillion Zim buck. 20 trillion! You see how many zeros here? If you want to learn about trillions, you got all the zeros right here. You know how many zeros that is? Now, if you think somehow this is not going to happen to the US dollar, here's your million-dollar US dollar bill, right? If you think for some reason that this piece of paper is any different than this piece of paper, then you really don't understand anything, right?
Didn't Congress introduce in the original stimulus bills in March the two trillion-dollar platinum coins? They're doing the same thing, right?
Well, they're trying to use that to solve the budget issue. One way to solve it is to go and issue debt with the Fed, so basically the Fed buys your debt and you get dollars in return. The other way to do it is just to mint a coin that is worth a trillion dollars. The US Mint, which is controlled by the government, you put that in Treasury, you give that to Mnuchin—well, for another 20 days, then you give it to Yellen—and suddenly the government has an extra trillion dollars. But again, it's just a piece of paper. It doesn't matter what it is, right?
So my point is that unless you put yourself in a safe area in non-correlated assets, you will not do well. When you see CEL token going up several thousand percent or Bitcoin going up several thousand percent, it's not that Bitcoin is doing so well; one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. It's just that now it takes three times as many dollars to buy one Bitcoin. It used to be 10,000 and now it's almost 30,000. So the only thing that changed is how many dollars it takes to buy a Bitcoin. Really, what society and all the people around you are telling you is: we know that our dollars are going to be like useless pieces of paper. I can't even buy an ice cream with these things, right? So, I'm willing to pay more and more and more to not be denominated in dollars and have a different asset—gold, stablecoins, or crypto—to be detached from the dollar economy.
We talk about it every week, but I did want to bring you Darth Vader—no, just kidding. I wanted to bring you the examples. These are fresh examples. You go to Zimbabwe right now, or to Turkey, or to Venezuela, or to Argentina, or to Lebanon, and now it's kind of propagating to other countries. The inflation rate is just going completely out of control, right? So when you see this spike in the prices of Bitcoin or Ethereum or anything else, all this represents is the fact that enough people, or many new people, are deciding to part with their dollars, and they're willing to pay more and more and more for non-correlated assets.
Bitcoin went parabolic just like CEL token. So I would be careful. I published this several times, telling people: hey, look at this parabolic move, we should see a retrenchment below 20,000, and you should continue averaging in, right? You should continue, if you want to buy some Bitcoin, to buy a little bit every month, right?
Let's look at some other stuff here. Again, we have brand new shirts. If you have not seen them, I'm waiting for mine. I'm still wearing my old Celsius shirts, my HODL shirts, and Unbank shirts. But if you want to get these new ones, they are being shipped, so they're only $18. The best way to communicate or advertise your commitment to basically take care of your finances and teach others, right? Teach others. That's point number seven, we've added that clearly. If you've done well, now you have to do good. This is the part where you do good: you teach others, right?
We had a great story. I got an email from a guy who was late on his flight, and he was stuck at the end of the TSA line. He had his HODL Celsius sticker on, and the TSA agent walked over to him, grabbed him, and he was shaking. He was like, "What's going on?" He's like, "Look, I'm a Celsius man. This thing went over $5." They were all excited, and he brought him to the front of the line. So if anyone tells you that CEL token does not have utility, you go to the airport and talk to some TSA agents, right?
Anyway, these are great shirts. They're really cool. They come in all sizes, in black only though. Just wear them, right? You wear them, people are going to ask you questions: "What is this? What is HODL? How do you unbank yourself?" and all that stuff, right? So definitely, again, we put it at cost. We're not trying to make any money here. It's just trying to get every one of you to get one of these shirts. If you want to go, the website is on top, us.io. That's my wife's company. They're made in the United States, so you'll be supporting businesses both in California, Texas, and New Jersey, which are the places where the stuff is made. So it's a win-win for everybody, right?
Yeah. Our community is getting so large now that just walking around you'll bump into a Celsian here and there.
Also, the Daily HODL did a great story, if you haven't seen it, basically stating that the top 20 crypto assets that did not register with the SEC were all going down, and the few that did were going up. So if you didn't read this article, it's another thing you should look into. We talked about CEL token and the gold thing.
Again, I did a prediction. This was on January 12. This article published on January 12, 2020, right? You have a timestamp here for my tweet: January 12, 2020, of me saying Bitcoin will finish the year above $30K. I missed it by a few hundred, right? It went to 29.6K and something. And now I'm telling you it's probably going to take a little bit of a hit. Again, the last time you'll be able to buy it at those low levels. So definitely, if you want to double up in January or February—in the next three months, it's going to probably have a correction. So when it takes that correction, again say, "Okay, I'm going to have four buys." Don't try to find the bottom; it's going to be very hard for you. If it drops 10–20%, you buy some. It continues dropping, you buy some more. It goes up, you buy some more. It doesn't matter what it does, you just break it into three or four buys, and this way you average in at a lower price, right? That's all you're trying to do.
Right. We have a lot of people on the stream now, and they try to say, "Oh, I'll wait for the dip," or, "I'll wait to buy at a certain price." Nobody knows what the price is going to do. The best strategy is just to buy a little bit every week, or every day, or every month, and then over time, because this is a long-duration asset, you're going to build those savings and those savings will continue to appreciate.
That's right. You see, I don't have to say anything; Zach is fully trained. I can retire now. That's it. No, I'm just kidding. You're doing great, Zach.
So this is a great chart if you haven't seen on TradingView.
Yes. Anyone can go on TradingView and create basically their own chart. So this is a CEL token chart. What I liked about it is that basically they put the news that we announced to kind of show what triggers CEL going up or down. It's a great way to understand what are the things that are helping CEL token and what are the things that are not helping CEL token.
Also, if you're not following my channel @Mashinsky on Twitter, there's a lot of great content here, a lot of posts that I do. We just crossed a million impressions on some of these tweets. So definitely thank you guys for sharing. I think this message that I pinned has close to 900 likes here, so I think that's an all-time record. Thank you for the ones who are following. The ones who are not, definitely join and follow me on Twitter. Obviously join us on YouTube as well. There's a lot of great content here. If you have content or you want me to share something, tag me and I'll try to share as much as I can with the community, right? I also usually tag Celsius Network and they repost these things.
And don't miss—we're doing an AMA with Charles Hoskinson with The Crow. Jason is going to be moderating the AMA. It's on Monday at 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Definitely don't miss that, and we'll be publishing a link of how you can join. The community is very excited about that. We will be adding Cardano in Q2 of 2021.
Oh, Alex, that's such huge news. I mean, this has been a community ask for a very long time. ADA is coming, you can confirm.
Yes, confirming in Q2 of 2021. Again, we wanted the chain to stabilize, we wanted to make sure that we got all the security stuff done. We're still waiting for a few updates, but looks like—and this is what Zach was talking about, this 24-hour livestream where we had a lot of guests. Again, this is community-organized; it's not Celsius putting it together. A lot of the initiatives here that you're seeing are all community-driven, right?
My Medium post about financial freedom, if you didn't read that, those are all great reads. Here's my daughter coming to visit me in New York. Thank you, Reena. My oldest daughter, and also my middle one, Natalie, also came to visit me. We took these funny pictures. I was trying to show what the people who did not buy Bitcoin feel like, you know? That's what it looks like. As you can see, there wasn't a soul on the streets. We were very safe because there wasn't anybody there. This is Manhattan on a weekday. It's just crazy, you know?
Anyway, moving on. We updated the site. There's a lot of new stuff on the site. If you don't know where to find our streams, now we're putting it on Fridays during the AMA, so you can easily find that here. As you remember last week, we told you we raised the rates for non-US to 6.2%. We earn more, we pay more, right? Some of our competitors do exactly the opposite: they earn more, they pay you less, they keep lowering the rates that they're paying you.
We also added corporate onboarding. So if you have a corporate account, you just go here on corporate onboarding right under "About," and we have the full process here. So it's much easier now to finish your full application. You can submit the documents in a safe way and everything else. If you have a corporation or you're doing your IRA or anything like that, this is where you go at it.
Also, for those of you who were lazy, remember there was a $50 special promo code. Now I'm spilling the beans.
Spilling the beans. Yeah, here we go. If you watch these videos—no, just kidding. Scroll all the way down. Do it. It is worth your while to read and understand what this is all about. This is some of our best content. And if you scroll all the way down, guess what? It's not a $50 billion bill, it's just a $50 bill, but it's going to be a $50 billion bill one day. If you just highlight that, the $50, it gives you the promo code TRUST, and you can go and basically read the conditions and sign up and earn $50 when you deposit $2,000 or more. It's still live. We're going to keep it live a few more days, but basically that's it.
We're always updating. There's always new stuff on events, or news, or videos, and so on. So definitely visit our site and learn as much as you can. Again, this is my Medium post if you haven't had a chance to read that. Also, we have a new ambassador who has created a whole new site in German. So if you speak German and you want to do everything in German, here's your site: celsiusnetwork.at.
And there's plenty of great content here in German. "Warum Celsius?" You see, that's "Why Celsius?" That's as much German as I know.
This is another article that just came out about what you should do with your spare cash. You shouldn't put it all in, but you should definitely try to put as much as you can away from the fiat, the pieces of paper that are going to be worthless. I can give you 50 examples of these. If you don't believe me, I have plenty of others. I'm collecting those bills from all over the world. Try to put as much as you can into non-correlated assets: gold, silver, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on, your favorite coins there. This is a great article. We're going to be adding it also to our YouTube channel, an interview on YouTube. You can just search for the title if you haven't seen it yet. Here is another one that I did with BeInCrypto.
These are great. I vary the content, I almost never repeat myself. If you've seen 10 videos and you think you know it all, I bet you you're going to learn something new from every video, because I rarely repeat myself for a good reason, right?
Ivan on Tech, this was yesterday, had a great episode. You see him going through the coins that increased the most in value, the biggest gainers. "Celsius, man, Celsius, Celsius! Oh my god, Celsius, look at this! Big shout out to Celsius. We covered them like months and months here in April. We covered them this year and look at this, man, look at this. Big, big shout out, big respect. CEL pumped 22%."
Ivan has been a great supporter of us. He was one of the first actually to look at the token economics, look at the flywheel, look at the team and say, "Hey, these guys are special, right? This is not like every other ICO." Big shout out to Ivan on Tech. If you're not following Ivan, get on his channel. He's a master. Definitely a lot to learn from him. Stuff that I don't do—I don't do technical analysis, I don't do predictions, I don't pick DeFi or CeFi coins or anything like that, right?
He has an academy where he teaches people the basics, even if you don't know anything about programming. Remember, blockchain programming is like a whole new language, meaning everybody has to learn a new language. So even if you don't know anything about programming, you have much less to catch up with a programmer because everybody has to learn a new language. So if you want to get into this, you want to change direction—I've spoken about this several times on different episodes about how this is your opportunity to switch away from whatever your job used to be before COVID. The world has pressed the reset button. Digitization—like we went into a time machine and we jumped 10 years forward as far as digitization is concerned. Blockchain is a guaranteed job if you have any experience on blockchain, and I guarantee you can find a job in a second. Work from your home, remote. Every company is hiring. Celsius is hiring. Everybody's hiring. So definitely take advantage of it, and Ivan does it better than anyone else.
We just got the user numbers. In the last week, we had 17,000 new users, and of those 17,000, 4,600 have made their first transfer.
Right? Normally we would do something—what's our normal number? Something like 9,000, I think. So almost double.
9,000 registrations, right? And of that, it would be something like 3,000 depositors or 3,500 depositors, right? So this is doubling, just doubled.
Normally when we double, we stay at that level and then we double again and so on. There are waves of adoption. I give credit actually to the Chainalysis thing that we published where we basically proved the assets, proof of community, all that stuff we talked about, because I think a lot of people who were skeptics and who were on the sidelines decided to join in.
Back to the Celsius Network: we're almost at 28,000. Guys, help us out, let's get to 30,000. Send this link to other people, have them sign up, subscribe. Here's a subscribe button. Also, when you subscribe, you've got to hit the notification.
Yeah, hit the notification.
Otherwise you're not going to know. We put several new videos almost every week. If you missed it, this is a creative interview that I did with Crypto Friend where we just talked about different things, not necessarily just crypto: what it is being a CEO and all kind of other stuff. "14 Reasons to Be Bullish on CEL"—again, Aaron Bennett did a great job here doing his analysis of this. You should definitely join his channel. He has great reviews and a lot of other content. I'm not going to get into all of it, but you guys can see plenty of good stuff that's available.
Let me see. I think this is it, right? What we're going through right now, really since 2017, this 2017 run-up, we've accumulated speculators, right? Remember, we had a four-man relay race, and I have it here. There's several videos that I've done about this where I'm presenting the handoff of the baton between the anarchists, the libertarians, the speculators, and now we're handing it off to what I call LTC—and I don't mean Litecoin, but long-term crypto holders, right?
That handoff, where speculators or people who are only here for the short term are giving up their coins or selling their coins to the long-term people, that's a process that actually takes a while. It's not something that happens very quickly.
Real estate investing is simpler and smarter than ever before.
I'll just show you here. Again, we've been talking about this for a very long time, so if you haven't seen my presentation, this is one of the good presentations to see. This is the history of all the empires, all the people that used to have the reserve currency, right? The United States is not the first one. All these countries used to have the reserve currency of the world. Here we move forward: there's more debt than equity right now worldwide, more issued debt than equity.
This is a very important slide that I want to remind you of. When you move from the dollar, we have four different stepping stones for you when you move away from the comfort zone to the fear zone. A lot more people are comfortable with gold, right? If I tell you to go from dollars to gold, half of the population says, "Sure, that's pretty safe." But if I tell you go from dollars to stablecoins, a lot of people go like, "What are you talking about? What is that, a token? What do I do with a token, right?" Well, it's earning 10%, right? It's generating yield for you. And the most difficult jump is for people to jump into crypto, to jump into Bitcoin, or Ethereum, or CEL token, or anything like that.
That's why, in the spirit of teaching others—step seven is teaching others—share with them this presentation or these slides and show them: okay, what are you comfortable with? Are you comfortable with gold? Great, let's go and do gold. Let's take 1% of your assets or 5% of your assets and do that. Again, the biggest problem we have as a community is women, right? So I call on all of you to go to your mother, or your girlfriend, or your sister, or your wife, or your daughter and show them this stuff. Both educate them as well as gift them, right? Create a wallet for them and give them that award. If you use your referral code, we subsidize it: we give you $20 and we give your daughter or your wife $20 as well, right? So we are subsidizing you teaching others.
You can pick any of these asset classes, it doesn't matter. We don't care if you bought Bitcoin, or if you bought gold, or if you bought a stablecoin, right? That doesn't matter for us. We're not trying to push one asset or trying to get you to do something that is good for us, right? We don't benefit from that. We only benefit when you HODL.
Yes. So again, here we talked about passing the baton relay race, right? Where we basically had the baton being handed off from Satoshi to the anarchists, then from the anarchists to the libertarians, then from the libertarians to the speculators, right? And then we thought the institutions are going to get us to new highs, but all we realized is really that this is all about more people just like you and me.
That's right. And the reason I can prove to you that it's not the institutions who got us to 30,000 is that the biggest run-up in the markets happens when all the institutions are not around, the markets are closed, the banks are closed, you can't transfer money, right? So when Bitcoin is running up, it's running because of retail, not because of institutions. All the PayPal customers, all the Venmo customers, the Cash App customers, the LINE Corp customers, some of our partners like Voyager and others—they're all bringing in retail. These are all retail users, hopefully.
LTC users, right? Long-term crypto holders who are buying away. Somebody's selling. It's not like no one is selling. If no one was selling, Bitcoin would be at $200,000. So, who's selling? The speculators are selling. The long-term hodlers are buying.
That's something that Michael Saylor said. He said, you know, he's not a trader, but he appreciates the traders providing that liquidity for him to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin.
That's right. So that was my point. So again, the recession of 2020, the fact that you really do not want to get caught with these things in your hand, right? And the handoff between the speculators and the LTCs, right? All right. So let's look at stats for 2020, right? We started the year with 515 million, and we're closing the year with over five billion in assets—over five billion in assets, right? 10x increase like this, and that's why also you're seeing like when people say, "Oh, CEL token, it's unsustainable, whatever." CEL token also went up 10x, right, or more. So these things are correlated. There's definitely a relationship between assets, users, assets, and the price of the underlying thing.
So we started the year with 30 employees, right? We're now over 150. So again, we didn't 10x employees, right? That would be 300. But like I said, we are hiring just 30 people for the call center. We have 15 new employees starting on Monday, right? 15 new employees. So we will be at over 200 very, very quickly. And just other stats: 288,000 users, right? So that's our all-time high. We paid $444,000 in withdrawal fees. Yes, when you withdraw your money from Celsius, we pay you to take your money out. That's how confident we are that you're going to come back, because no matter where else you're going to go, your coins are not going to earn as much, they're not going to be treated as well, and no one else in crypto is here to act in your best interest, right? We are. Why? Because me, Zach, Tom, everybody, Kim, everybody who's working on the show, everybody in Celsius has their assets right next to yours, right?
We don't live on fees. We don't charge any fees. So we earn money, you earn money, we all try to do better and better and better, right? Over 50,000 Bitcoin again makes us, I think, the fourth largest Bitcoin holder, second largest asset manager with over 5 billion in assets, record new users as we talked about, and over 312 million in deposits in the last 30 days. And what was the number for last week?
Last week, 17,000 new users, and then we just crossed the 100,000 active users mark, which is just absolutely phenomenal. 100,000 people are holding money with Celsius right now. I mean, that's—
Yeah, that's right. The difference between the 288,000 and 100,000 is that some people do withdraw their money. So we don't count anyone who has less than, I think, $100 in their wallet—$10 in their wallet is not counted in the 100,000, right? I did want to show you the top 200, right? I don't know if you can share the screen again. Sorry, I forgot to do this one.
Right? So if you look at the top 200, every one of them is now a millionaire, right? Every one of them is a millionaire. And I remember when it took only 120,000 CEL to join the top 200.
Yeah, now it's 239,000. But even sorry, here, now it's 194,000. And we're going to be expanding this list to the top 500. So our next goal is to make the top 500 people millionaires. Okay. Now you show me another project in crypto that made 200 millionaires in one year. Right. So I think again, sharing is caring, teaching others, right? Following all these steps, acting in other people's best interest—you do good and you're going to do well. So we started with doing good, but we're asking you to do the opposite: now that you've done well, do good, right? Teach others.
And each person has a different way of going at it. This is not about shoving it down their throat; it's about education. Most people don't know even what money is or how it's being created, or why now is a different time than what we've seen in the last 100 years, right? It's a different environment. All right. So we wanted to talk about predictions for 2021. It's hard to predict stuff considering this kind of growth, but we definitely expect to have more than 10 billion in assets and over 500,000 users. So that's part of kind of the predictions we can make.
And again, I do think Bitcoin is going to—it's either going to go over 100,000 or it's going to oscillate between 30 and 50,000. It really depends on how many sellers exist in those price levels. That's a piece we don't know. No one knows how many hodlers are sitting on their hands and are going to get tempted and dump their bags, right? That's really what we need to understand. And as the price goes up, the whole community is learning how resilient and how much of a hodler we really are.
How do you think those dynamics are going to play out? Like at the end of 2017, everyone was, "Oh my god, Bitcoin is the new thing. It's going to the moon. It's going to be a million dollars." And the depression that had onset from 20,000 down to like 3,200 was terrible, right? And it was in people's wildest dreams to even get back to 20,000. So going forward, is it going to be now on the consciousness of people that, wait, this will always keep going up over time?
So 2017, what really brought the market down was the CME futures and the CBOE, where for the first time you could short the market. You couldn't short the market effectively before that. Institutions and big whales or big traders couldn't do that, right? And suddenly overnight in December of 2017, it was actually Treasury that opened the gates and allowed everybody to go and short. And large players who basically bet on this being the peak of the market placed billions of dollars worth of bets kind of shorting, going against Bitcoin, right? Today, the market already has all of that built in, meaning you can short as much as you want. You could have shorted at 10,000, 20,000, 30,000. And we've seen billions of dollars in liquidations as the market went up from that 7,000–8,000 level to 29,000.
So none of that is applicable today. It could be something else. It could be something that has to do with regulation, or something that has to do with what the Biden administration says, or some legal action. For example, if there is legal action against the stablecoins that forces USDC or USDT to change its stuff, it's definitely going to have a huge impact on the price and on the momentum, right? So again, I'm not betting on any of these things. I'm just saying that right now it's too much, too fast, and we're going to have a correction. It's normal. It's part of the game. A 20 to 30% correction is something that happens all the time.
March 12th, we had almost a 50% correction right when COVID hit, so we don't want that. But a healthy correction that kind of flushes out the weak hands, takes the same Bitcoin, and puts it with the real LTC hodlers is a good thing for crypto, right? So again, our advice for 2021, if you weren't listening, let's do it again. Okay, here we go. Our advice is stay the course. Don't change anything. Don't try to become a trader. Don't try to become a pro. Just stay a hodler, okay? Celsius delivered Bitcoin plus 6.2%. Okay, Bitcoin—all the appreciation of Bitcoin plus 6.2% if you were hodling with Celsius.
There's over a thousand hedge funds out there. Show me one hedge fund that delivered Bitcoin plus 6.5%. Go ahead. I'll give you $1,000 to anyone who can show me one hedge fund, a real hedge fund, not somebody who's managing $10, that delivered better than Bitcoin and netted the year. Now, we did that while not trading at all. We didn't trade any position. We never bought or sold Bitcoin because we thought it was going up or down, while all those other guys, that's what they do every day. So you want to win the race, you stay the course, right? And we've proven again and again, every year we've proven that we outperform everybody else.
Now, something very interesting happened last week. Two companies passed Warren Buffett and had a bigger market cap than Warren Buffett. So let's say we'll give a $200 award to two people who put that in the chat. Which two entities have a higher market cap now than Warren Buffett? Let's see.
What do we got? The mob is after it. Come on, Celsians.
I'm not seeing an answer yet. Which two companies passed up—Tesla and Bitcoin? I'm seeing—
That's right, Tesla. Okay. All right, Tesla and Bitcoin, Tesla and Bitcoin. Again, Warren Buffett is considered the best investor in the world, and two startups, right—Tesla is a startup, Bitcoin is a startup. Yes, it does not have a CEO, it does not have an office, no one is in charge, and yet it generated more value, it created more value than Warren Buffett did in 70 years. Crazy, right? And it did that like this, like poof, right?
And Celsius did better than Bitcoin, right? Again, if you are holding Bitcoin, the only place in the world where you can do better than Bitcoin and get 6.2% is Celsius, right? So we're talking about not just the best-performing asset class. It's like imagine the athletes: you know, the first prize, the second prize, the third prize, and then there's an extra layer. Okay, here's the guy who kind of beat all the champions. That's what we are. We're in a pantheon all by ourselves.
Again, I'm not giving us all the credit. I'm just telling you that what we do is outperform the best performers, right? You still have to pick Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or Litecoin, or CEL, or whatever.
But whatever that is, we outperform it by delivering that extra yield, right? Right, yeah. And I was supposed to show you this video from 2017. Let me see if I have it. So just stop the sharing for a second. You stop the sharing.
Yeah, yeah. We're looking at you.
Okay. One sec. Let me try to find this video. I forgot to download it.
Yeah. Oh, so Alex, right now we're at an all-time high. We've got 1,620 live viewers. Thank you, everybody. Please like and share. Spread this with your family, spread it with your friends. Something that came up on the 24-hour live stream yesterday was family capitulation on how well Celsius and crypto overall were doing. People that we had been talking to for several years about creating an allocation to crypto or putting your crypto in Celsius finally came to the table and said, "Hey, I've seen Bitcoin, I've seen this. I get it. They're creating money left and right. Please show me." So a lot of new people came in just this last week. They finally got convinced that the dollar is not the way to be, right?
Yeah, and again, that's amazing, like the coverage. So this is a video from 2017. I think you could share the screen.
Yep. Okay, we're seeing your screen.
So this is the Milken Institute. You know the cost of a ticket to join? $25,000. You want to be one of these bald guys sitting in the audience? You see these bald guys in front on the camera? I'm kidding, I'm just kidding. But it cost $25,000. Now I'm on stage here with Reuters. The lady is the reporter from Reuters. Then it's the guy who's now number two under Mnuchin. He's from Treasury. He actually runs a lot of stuff for Mnuchin. And the guy all the way on the—Nouriel Roubini, right? The guy who has to eat his hat for calling Bitcoin a scam. And it's him and Warren Buffett, right, rat poison.
And Peter Schiff, yeah, exactly. But listen to what I'm saying in 2017. This is 2017 talking about why crypto is so important, right?
[Video clip] "It's like decentralized Buddhism, right? People are saying, well, it is. Think about it. I'm not talking about the speculators. I'm talking about people from all over the world that called me and said, 'Alex, are you actually going to build what you're saying? Are you going to do that? Are you going to give an opportunity to the disadvantaged, the people who don't have a chance, to the people who through our existing banking system cannot move ahead, cannot join the middle class?' And that's what this is trying to solve. This is not just about speculators. The speculators are like tourists. They come and they leave, okay? And right now we're seeing a wave of all these tourists leaving. But like we talked about before, the people that are here for the long term, the people who are here to change humanity and to save it from itself are here for that reason. And I know there's skeptics and the people who don't believe in anything. And if you look at why the government is so careful about overregulating this, and I applaud the SEC and the CFTC and everybody else because they are giving everybody an opportunity."
So yeah, back to the show. But basically, you can see that we did not change our tone or what we're doing or how we're doing basically since we were created, right? We were always focused on the same thing, and I think we can clearly state that we delivered, right? Those top 200, most of them are people who didn't have almost anything, right? They placed a bet, they prayed, they were hoping that we were telling the truth, they were hoping that we are going to stick to our word, they were hoping that we're going to deliver. And all of you, right, all almost 300,000 of you who've joined and participated have created this. We didn't create it, you created it, right?
Without your assets, we wouldn't be earning this yield. We wouldn't have the leverage against the institutions. We're now earning yield from, again, institutions, exchanges, DeFi, mining, right? We're going into all those areas that used to be only controlled by the very, very rich, and we're making them pay you tolls, right? You are now the toll collector. Instead of the bank being the toll collector, instead of Treasury being the toll collector, instead of all the rich fat cats being the toll collector, now you are the toll collector. Somebody wants to do something on DeFi, guess who Uniswap pays the most money to? Celsius Network, right?
So those are the things, and again, those are good things. It's not a bad thing; it's a good thing because Uniswap is a neutral platform that says, "Hey, you want to provide liquidity? Great, I'll pay you 0.3%," right? And we're just providing the most liquidity over there on your behalf. You can't beat this system. You can't, right? So everybody else is trying to just copy our promotions or copy our rewards, but not act in your best interest and still charge you fees upon fees or hide how much they're making and not give you 80%. Sooner or later, they all are going to come to light, right? And sooner or later, you can't fool all the people all the time. So anyway, it's January 1st, 2021, and we had an amazing 2020, and I just wanted to definitely celebrate some of these moments.
Absolutely. Zach, you have a few updates on your list, so you want to go— Yeah. I mean, there are so many people in the chat right now. We've got tons of questions. We'll start hitting you with stuff. Biggest thing I've seen right now is: what's your comment on the XRP action? Is that having a positive effect on Celsius because we've always been fully compliant? And how does that affect CEL token? Is it a security, and kind of go over that whole scenario?
Right. So there are very, very few companies who filed with the SEC, and I thought those are like the good actors. The SEC did issue two or three kind of no-action letters. We are not one of them. We didn't ask for one—you do have to ask for it—but we're definitely in the camp of the few. All the other people that you saw in red going down when XRP was crashing, everybody else who did not file with the SEC was crashing with them. We don't know what's going to happen there. We are still accepting loans. We're still accepting XRP deposits. No decision has been made. The SEC filing a lawsuit against XRP does not mean XRP is a bad coin, or XRP is out of business, or XRP is going to be shut down, right? A judge or jury has to decide that, and that court case is going to take a year or two to make its way, and it may go all the way to the Supreme Court, right? We don't know what's going to happen here. I think Ripple is going to fight this real hard.
And again, it's part of our community. We are supporting Ripple. I'm not a judge or a jury; I don't know who's right and who's wrong. But the SEC is definitely trying to make a case out of Ripple to warn and deter others from taking the same action that they did. Next question.
Sure. Okay. With the $3 bonus and $5 prices hitting so quickly, what's going on with those bonuses? Is it going to be the same lockup? Are they going to be released soon, or what's going on with those?
Yeah, so we're definitely going to have a lockup. We're not releasing those. But again, we divided the second award. Remember, there was a 25 million token award, and there was a second 25. The second 25 is broken into several price levels. We'll be announcing that when it's finalized. So the amount, even though it's going to be locked up, each layer is much smaller than the first award at $1.50. And of course, we got there very, very quickly. But I think most employees, if not all employees, are going to do the same lockup. It worked very well for them, right? All the employees that locked up at $1.50 are now seeing their tokens at $5, right? So they're not sitting there and saying, "Oh my gosh, I wish I didn't lock." Right, everybody's happy about that. So it's a win-win for everybody, but we'll be publishing that information when it's available.
All right. We're earning wealth together. I mean, in this year and most likely next year, a lot of people will be generating a lot of new wealth. How should they manage that, or who should they look to to learn how to manage those newly acquired assets?
Well, so if you are in crypto, managing it is very simple: you just keep them in a Celsius wallet and you keep earning the yield. So you don't have to do anything. You're not going to get that yield—you're not going to get 10.5% on your stablecoins from Merrill Lynch, or Bank of America, or JPMorgan, right? That's 100 times more than what they pay you. So if you made amazing returns on CEL or Bitcoin or whatever and you're cashing out and moving it into the dollar world, you're not going to earn anything, and that dollar is going to become worthless. So if you're doing that, you are not following these steps. You're not learning anything that we've been trying to teach you, right?
The whole point is to keep that balance. And even though you only put 5 or 10% of your assets into this bucket, as it appreciates, it may become more valuable than your entire stock portfolio. And the main point is to leave it there, right? Not to move it back to the stock or the bond market, right? Because that is where all of the risk is. The risk is not that Bitcoin is going down. I know most of you think, "Oh, you know, it's so risky." The risk is that you're going to wake up and your dollars are going to be worthless. Everything you own in dollars will be worth one-tenth of what it is today.
And if you don't believe me, again, I have in that presentation that I showed you before, the LATOKEN presentation that I was going through on our YouTube channel, I go step by step explaining to you how it happened to the Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire, and the Dutch, and the British, and the French, and the Germans—you name it, right? It's just most of us don't know history, so we don't know that that happened already 10 times. So it's going to happen to the US dollar, no question about it. The question is: did you accumulate enough non-dollar assets, and did you sit on your hands? Next question.
Like back in, I think, the early '80s, it took something like five or six hours to earn one share of the S&P 500, and now it's over 140 hours to earn that same asset.
Yeah, and the average CEO—not in Celsius, but the average CEO—makes 300 times more than you. Your CEO, the guy who runs your company, makes at least 300 times more than you, okay? If it's a public company, you can see it; it's published and everybody knows, right? So the world is not a fair place. And the world, unfortunately, no one cares for you. That's why I always mention that you want to make sure that there is somebody there when you fall between the cracks or when you crash, and you've got to make deposits with your family, because your family is the only set of people who are going to care about you if something bad happens, right?
And unless you make deposits during the good times with them—show them your love, participate in the events, do everything that you have to do as a family member—when you need their help, they're just not going to be there for you, and strangers are definitely not going to help you. So again, make deposits, and then when you need it, you can make withdrawals. All these rules apply to your family just like they apply to crypto. Next question. Right. Hey, are we going to show a demo of the web app today, or are we going to do that later in the week? I think it's on the 15th. We're doing it January 15th. So we're doing a special AMA where we are going to walk everybody through our web app, meaning the web version. You'll be able to do everything on the computer that you can do on your phone, right? So it's going live for platinum users on January 15th. Everything is on schedule as promised, and it will be opened up, I think, two or three weeks later to everybody else. Next question.
So be platinum to get that first access to the web app. All right. People are now starting to receive their $600 stimulus checks. It's been 10 months and the government borrowed, you know, $3,000 apiece and is giving us $600 apiece. What do we do? What do we do with this chump change or this bribe money?
So I always tell you: pay off your credit cards first, right? Even before you buy Bitcoin or before you invest in stablecoins or CEL token or anything else, right? The people who are robbing you blind are your credit card providers, you know? So if you have any balances there, first you've got to work that down, and then you've got to put money to work, right? I mean, we have "reduce high-interest debt," okay, point number three here. Again, most of you don't understand the cost of compounding interest. You can't even calculate it in your head, but all that debt on your credit card is compounding. So you want it to compound for you, but you also want to eliminate all the debt that's compounding against you, right? So those are the two sides of the equation. Next question.
All right. Great question from the chat here. He says, "I am a business owner. Can I hold my treasury with Celsius?"
Yeah. So we have a corporate application. I showed it before; you can scroll back to the beginning of the show on our website. When you click on the top menu, it says corporate onboarding, and you open a corporate account and you can manage any assets you want—anything we accept, 46 different assets—as a corporation or as an LLC.
All right, here we're going to go into some rapid fire. Okay, are you ready? Are you warmed up?
Okay. Is Celsius planning on getting a credit card?
Jordan is giving us a special delivery.
Oh, okay. Yeah, here we go.
Oh, he needs a cable for his rig because his gaming rig is missing a cable. So emergency: let's stop the AMA and take Jordan's rig. You've got to fix the Wi-Fi connector, so go work on that. Yeah. What was the question again?
Okay, okay. Back to rapid fire. Is Celsius planning on getting a credit card?
We talked about it. Yes, we are working. When we have something ready to go, we will publish it. Next question.
All right. Does Celsius have insurance?
How do you make money on a 1% loan?
So again, we have four times the collateral, right? If we gave you $1,000 at 1%, we have $4,000 worth of collateral, and we're earning money on that. So even if we're charging, let's say, 5% for every thousand dollars, we're making 20%, right, because we have four times as much. I describe this in detail with Digital Asset News, right? Digital Asset News, an hour-long interview just talking about this. It's also available on our channel here. So if you just scroll down, you will find the Digital Asset News interview. It's somewhere here, one of these, and just watch that. I think it's this one. No, it's not this one. But anyway, the point is it's right there and it's very detailed.
