"If you bought BTC and you sleep like a baby, you don’t have enough BTC" | Alex Mashinsky interview

Hello, my name is Joe. I'm here today with Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius. We're gonna have an interesting conversation about custody, of custodying, bitcoin, other macroeconomic trends that we're seeing, and of course, you know, trends in the cryptocurrency space. So, Alex, hello, how are you doing today?

Great, great. Paris, amazing. We got excellent weather and a full house here. We took over, we conquered the Boris here in Paris.

Yeah.

And we talk about, you know, normally we talk about how Defi is going to conquer Tradfi and that's what we've done here. We conquered the center of, you know, Tradfi in Paris.

Absolutely. It's a poetic sort of image.

Poetic win. Yes.

And just picking up on your keynote yesterday, you know, there was the Axie Infinity hack recently where Vitalik's response was to say that, you know, the space needs these sort of semi centralized solutions. I mean, I'm sure Celsius has something to say on this.

Well, we actually built it, so we totally agree with Vitalik and we built Celsius X. The website is CelsiusXIO and if you're a Celsius user, you can automatically basically take any of the assets you have, unlock them and then we will wrap and issue natively issue assets on the blockchain. So for example, on Polygon or some other chain. And the main advantage with that is that you don't use layer two bridges. So layer two bridges, you are one blockchain, I'm another blockchain. We put a smart contract between us and we basically. So here it's any to any and it's native. So we're not relying on the code being written properly or some hacker figuring out a back door or jumping through a window or whatever. So we're solving. Imagine if you build a bridge between two blockchains and half of the cars fell in the water. Right. No one would drive that bridge. Well, that's basically what we've done with layer two bridging. Right. Unfortunately, it's not a solution because there's not gonna be mass market adoption if half of the cars fall into the river. Right. So, so we build a tunnel instead.

Okay.

Called Celsius X layer 0 instead of layer 2. And you should try it out.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, any response from Vitalik?

We're waiting for Vitalik to use it to wrap some eth, you know, so.

Driving the car over the bridge, you know.

Yeah, well, he, look, he's, he, like you said, he understands the problem and he's basically saying, look, we don't have to be 100% DeFi. CEFI and DeFi 2 sides of the same coin. And sometimes you need to use cefi, sometimes you need to use defi. And that's what Celsius does every day.

Absolutely. Okay. I mean, there's a lot of good things happening in this space, a lot of things happening for Celsius, but there's also a saddening macroeconomic backdrop at the moment. What's your most pressing concern? Or what are you losing sleep over?

Yeah, so I'm a Ukrainian by birth, and obviously, when the world goes to war, this is not just a war between Russia and Ukraine, and it's definitely not a war between the Russian people and the Ukrainian people. This is like one crazy guy picking up a war with the rest of the world. And here, the crypto community came together very quickly. Right. We published an address, I think, a day after the war started, with the Ukrainian ministry, Finance Ministry. We. We raised. Helped Ukraine raise over $70 million. I was at Bitcoin 2022. I just had an interview with the deputy minister about all this, and they need more. So I'm calling on the community to. You can find on my. The links on my Twitter Mashinsky, or. Or you can also go to the official Ukrainian ministry Twitter handle. They have the BTC and ETH addresses published, USDC as well. So all of us, but what we're celebrating is really how quickly the community moved before the us, before uk, before France jumped in and decided to help the Ukraine. Crypto was there and they started using the money the next day. They're buying food rations. They were buying what they needed for the hospitals and so on.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what do you think that says about the cryptocurrency industry in its reaction to setting up these donation addresses? What does that say about the industry?

Well, we arrived, right? So. So I think until now, we were a sideshow. Until now, we were. The community was perceived as like these quirky, weird people who decided to print their own monopoly money. And now you're seeing that nations are calling on us to help them out.

So, you know, we're in this tricky consolidation period. You know, Bitcoin's around 40,000 at the time of recording.

Yeah.

Do you have any price predictions you'd like to share with us? You know, one of the things we like to do together on a regular basis.

Yeah. So we called the bottom. I was on several shows on February 22nd, 24th, and people asked me the Same thing. Okay. You know, I think it was $33,000. And I was like, no, this is the bottom, right? We're very strong support in that 30 to 33,000. And between Luna buying, you know, billions of dollars worth of bitcoin between a lot of like you see here, right? I mean the show is, is, it's a mob scene, right?

Institutional.

And this is just institutional. Imagine if they invited the retail guys, right? So this is all institutional. A. So I definitely think that the demand is here.

Okay.

So I don't see us revisiting previous lows.

Okay.

But there are some clouds in the, in the sky. So one example, Russia isn't giving up. That's not like they walked away, right. They're going to come back and attack Ukraine again. Everybody's preparing for it, but that's going to put pressure on the public markets on Bitcoin, Ethereum and so on. Another driver is again, the Fed. Right. Don't fight the Fed. And the Fed right now is tightening, raising rates, pulling liquidity out of the market. And all that does is basically makes people less giddy, less are willing to take risk. Okay, so, so that's gonna, it takes longer. It's gonna take us longer to hit new highs. But I still expect us to break that 60,000 this year on Bitcoin, break the 4,500 on Ethereum.

Okay.

Those are the kind of two levels that I think are important to watch.

So all time highs this year.

All time highs this year, unless we go to World War iii. Right. So if we, if, if Russia does something stupid like throw a nuclear bomb or, or start killing people with chemical weapons or whatever in the Ukraine because they want to win at any cost. And then we are talking about a completely different scenario.

Yeah, yeah, that's the rule. Not hoping for that.

Yes, exactly. We're all knocking on wood. There's not wood, so we can't do it, but knocking on wood to make sure that it doesn't happen.

And yeah, obviously you occupy this unique vantage point. You see the retail side, you see the institutional side. Obviously you mentioned institution, institutions being here. We're in the form of, bourse, the former stock exchange. What are you seeing from the institutional side right now? Are there any sort of triggers, any catalysts that you see that are bringing this new money into the space?

So first there's a record institutional participation, Right. So everybody's dipping their toe even if they're not doing much. Like even here in France, you see the MF and others pushing to adopt.

Digital assets you know that right there?

Yeah. They're across the street. I know. They're watching us. They're taking pictures. They have one of these long cameras taking a picture of everybody walking in and out of their bores. But the point is that I think across the world, both regulators and institutions have accepted that this is a new asset class, right? So now the question is, what are we doing about it? So Goldman opens a desk with 100 people and it's a city ads hire several hundred people for, for the crypto desk, right. They understand that their, their high net worth are asking for it. So they have to fill those orders, they have to provide the service. And they're starting to explore how do they participate. Because, you know, normally if you're an institution and you want to, you, let's say you're doing stocks and bonds and suddenly you want to do commodities. You just go to your regular vendor, say, hey, add the commodities module to my software. You flip a switch and you're in the commodities business. You can do that with crypto, right? Crypto is a completely different animal. It's running on different rails, different software. But they're coming. The key thing, because it's also good news, right? Because you asked me about the price of bitcoin. Think about it. No bank in the United States owns bitcoin. No major bank in France owns bitcoin. Right? So, so, so that's all good thing because that's all new demand, additional demand. So we have the same number of coins, right? There's never going to be more than 21 million bitcoin. But the demand is, is, is coming, increasing, right? So more demand, no more supply, higher prices.

Fantastic. Perhaps as a final question then, I've asked you what you're losing sleep over. What's getting out?

I sleep like a baby. I don't know what you're talking about.

What's, what's getting out of baby.

Let me tell you why I'm sleeping like a baby, okay? Most people, that's a good way of spinning around. Yeah, it's very simple. So people come to me and they're like, you know, they show me spreadsheets with how they're calculating how much Bitcoin they need to have. And I'm like, what are you doing? What are you talking about? They're like, well, that's how, that's my formula. And I average in. And I'm like, it's very simple. Okay, if you bought some bitcoin and you sleeping, can't sleep at night, that means you have too much bitcoin. Okay. And if you bought some bitcoin and sleep like a baby, that means you don't have enough bitcoin. Okay? It's that simple. It's just a sweet spot. Find that sweet, sweet spot, spot. And, and just stick with it because for each person it's a different. Some people are very neurotic and 1% of their assets in bitcoin is too much.

Okay.

And, and some people are like me, where the vast majority of my assets are in bitcoin and I still sleep like a baby. I keep buying more and more trying to find that point where I'm not going to sleep well at night and I can't find it. So my conviction is much higher than most people.

Yeah.

And the conviction is because our traditional monetary system, tradfi, is rotten from the inside. You know, under this I have a shirt that says banks are not your friends. You know, and unfortunately, again, banks are so greedy and so desperate to steal from all of us. Right? Take. Take from us so they can deliver profits to their shareholders. That's all they're doing is just stealing from us, making money on the money we made. Right. And then giving it all to their shareholders and then not going to change that business model. So you can't fix that. Right. That's why we're building a new system. And in that new system, bitcoin is king. You know, Ethereum is queen and. And Doge is the jester and do. Do the j. I love it. You see, we're a good team. We're going on the road show together. So instead of creating more of that.

Yeah.

We have too many companies that are really ruining or, or they make us lose customers. Like when you give somebody 10, 10x leverage and they blow up, they're never going to come back to crypto. You lost them forever. So we now we need to recycle people instead of growing the community. So for us, if you want your coins and my coins to be more valuable, the main thing we have to do is make sure we don't burn people because we try to charge them 7% on the credit card transaction or where we give them leverage and stole their coins. Right. Those are the things we have to really change.

Thank you so much, Alex. Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius Even. Thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me.