'I do see us going all the way to $160K this year' | Exclusive interview with Alex Mashinsky

It's like a spring, right? We stretch it too much, we put too much leverage. Too many people got greedy. Now all the liquidation is out of the system. Our tank is empty. The spring has gone back to its original position. You'll be taking a loan against it.

Yeah.

You'll be paying a little bit of interest on that loan, but your bitcoin will not be touched.

I want to get your thoughts on the market, if you can talk a little bit about it, because obviously, and I'm a hodler, so I don't, you know, I don't worry, but people that may be new to this space or some people may be freaking out about the price of bitcoin being over 60 and now it's, I think, under 40. What are your thoughts on the market?

So, you know, when you go higher, too much, too fast, you are bound for a correction. And you can see my tweets both in March and February saying, hey, we're gonna have a crash, we're gonna have a crash. I even said 30,000. And people there were a lot of Twitter haters who were like, shut up. Don't talk about it. If you don't have anything positive to say, don't say anything. So it's like a spring, right? We stretch it too much, we put too much leverage. Too many people got greedy. And one twee, elon caused all of the short sellers to basically pile on and try to short or try to depress the price of bitcoin. So. And what that did is it created liquidations. So now all the liquidations out of the system, our tank is empty. The spring has gone back to its original position. We can slowly build up more momentum. So I do see us going all the way to 160,000 this year. I think we may go a little bit lower than that. We're going to close the year lower, but we. We haven't seen the highs yet for 2021.

So my thoughts on that. Now is the time to buy bitcoin because it's on sale. That's what I think.

So, yeah. So there are several ways where you can buy bitcoin at a discount. Right? So I'll give you one example. Grayscale, which is normally an institutional vehicle, is trading at a discount. So you can buy GBTC with your brokerage account and get a 15% discount. You buy the same bitcoin that Coinbase sells you, but you're buying it at a 15% discount. So there are opportunities. There are examples of these things. Or otherwise you can buy it At Celsius, deposit at Celsius and then earn yield on it. Earn 6.2% on your Bitcoin.

Right, right. And you mentioned about Elon Musk in his tweets. Can you share any more thoughts around that? I mean, you know, what is this healthy?

So, look, obviously Elon is a big celebrity. He's got tens of millions of followers. And I think he's. I call him a tourist. He's a tourist in crypto. He's here to collect more followers. He's not here to help you or me Hodl or learn about it. He's asking more questions, basic questions that you know. So I don't see him helping the community. Right. I see him basically see sawing, manipulating. You know, one day it's four bitcoins. Like a girlfriend, one day I love you. One day I don't love you. You know, that's not what we're looking for.

Right, right. I agree with you. I want to know if you can comment on this because when he said that you can use bitcoin to buy a Tesla and it seemed like he was so supportive of the space and he', oh, it's not a green. It's not a green initiative. Do you believe that that was his real thinking of getting rid of the bitcoin for Tesla because. Or was that just an excuse just because he was just done with bitcoin? What do you think?

Look, if the richest guy in the world is willing to exchange a bitcoin for Tesla, you have to ask yourself, who is getting the good deal? Are you getting a good deal for an asset that's going to deep. The minute you bought that Tesla, it's worth less than what you paid for it. But that bitcoin is going to increase in value. So that transaction is good for Elon, but it's not good for you. Right. So buying. You want to buy a Tesla? Come to Celsius, we'll give you a dollar loan and you can buy your Tesla. You don't need to spend your bitcoin. So again, Elon is here for Elon. It's not here for the community. He's not here for decentralization. He's a tourist.

Right.

You know, he's coming to Cryptoland and now he's leaving Cryptoland.

What do you want to see happen in the future for the crypto community and your community at Celsius?

So look, we're definitely achieving new highs as far as people in crypto, but we're still only 1% of the population, the other 99%, especially women, still think that all of us here are crazy, right? So you are the exception, of course. You know, you've been at it for several years. We've known each other and you've been a great communicator and educator for the community at large. But most people still think that we are like that. We don't know what we're doing, right? So, for example, Celsius just teamed up with iHeart. They have 265 million users. And we teamed up so we can reach out and educate the people that are not in the tent to understand that all of us are here to act in their best interest, right? And it's very hard for people to think that someone who's not a bank, who's not a financial institution, can do better than their trusted banks and trusted financial institutions. These institutions are the ones who are stealing from you every day. They're the ones who are making hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars in profit and paying their shareholders. They're not paying you at Celsius in defi, we're paying the depositor, we're not paying the shareholder. And that's what's so hard for people to understand. So I think the biggest task we have to do is educate, right? It's not about convincing people to buy bitcoin. It's about convincing them that this community is acting in their best interest.

You were also on a panel or a few panels. So what did you discuss while you were on that panel?

So everybody wants to know the future of mining and the future of yield and where bitcoin prices are going. So we actually yesterday announced that we invested over $200 million into mining in North America. So we're now one of the largest miners in the world. And it's all green, renewable energy, solar, wind, solar. And we're super excited about that because we have a lot of basically, you know, all of this discussion about, is bitcoin going to be green, is it going to be renewable? We put all that to bed with this giant investment to make sure that, you know, all the naysayers, all the fudders, all the people are fighting bitcoin are just, just going to go somewhere else, right?

So my question is, so I'm seeing this is becoming a trend and it's good because you just invested all that with green bitcoin mining. Do you think other companies are going to start getting on board and do you think we're going to see a, like a shift in the mindset of the crypto community to push for green bitcoin initiatives.

Look, first of all, bitcoin is already more than half coming from renewable resources. So it's not like it was all coal. And we just make it a little bit greener. It's already green. We're just making sure that we're pushing that further along and increasing that percentage. So you don't need to convince people to. To use renewable energy. Renewable energy is cheaper than coal and natural gas. So all we're doing is putting more pressure on that accelerator to make sure that we can mine bitcoin, more bitcoin in North America instead of mining it in China or mining it in Kazakhstan or wherever it's being made today.

Got it. Yeah, that's important. And also, Celsius is now a part of Visa's fintech program.

Yeah. You don't miss any of the news. Yeah, I read all. So today, most of the programs that. The credit card programs that exist make you sell your bitcoin. Why? Because the companies that offer the card are exchanges, and they want to make fees on you making that exchange, buying or selling bitcoin. So you buy Starbucks and they sell your bitcoin for the Starbucks. That's not what we want. We want people to hodl. So. To hodl. Let's create a card that instead of selling your bitcoin, you just take a loan against your bitcoin. So Celsius created the first card that does that in a partnership with Visa. We announced it again yesterday. We had Visa in our event, and we're super excited about that because, again, we're a community. Celsius is a community of Hodlers. And the Hodlers don't want to sell bitcoin. They don't want to part with their coins. So we solved that problem for them with a beautiful credit card.

So that's really amazing, a really great idea. Basically, if I wanted to go into a shop and buy a $50 shirt, let's just say I can use that credit card and my bitcoin would just not be touched at all.

Yes. Wow. You'll be taking a loan against it. Yeah. You'll be paying a little bit of interest on that loan, but your bitcoin will not be touched.

So when will your users have access to that credit card?

That's coming in Q3 of this year, so a few months from now. But you can go to our website already and sign up for it.

Right? Right. Yes. Great. Well, Alex, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. And, yeah, see you next time.

Thanks for having me again.

Thank you.