Earlier this month, the pioneering decentralized finance application (DeFi) for loans, Celsius, exceeded 50,000 in total Bitcoin (BTC) deposits on the platform.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Celsius founder and VoIP pioneer Alex Mashinsky discussed the milestone, articulating that it was never his plan to serve the „one percent“ of society.

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On the subject of exceeding 50,000 BTCs in user deposits, Mashinsky described the milestone as „a good thing and a bad thing.

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„We are not ahead of our adoption plan in number of users, but we are definitely ahead of the plan in the total amount under management,“ he said.

„The good news is that we have enough money to make a successful business profitable, so we can do more for people who don’t have that much, […] who have five or ten dollars. But the bad news is that we end up supplying one percent.

„Our average account is around $18,000, that wasn’t the plan,“ Mashinsky continued.

„We realize that despite our success, we have not fulfilled the mission, which was to bring 100 million new people to the crypts.

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Celsius’s incentive deposits to small-scale hodlers
Mashinsky said that Celsius recently introduced special rates that reinforce the benefits obtained by the first deposit made by account holders who have a small amount of crypto in an attempt to encourage greater adoption among users with Bitcoin Trader / Bitcoin Code / Immediate Edge / Bitcoin Circuit / Bitcoin Billionaire / Bitcoin Era / Bitcoin Evolution / The News Spy / Bitcoin Profit / Bitcoin Revolution:

„The point is [to] have the big guys with the millions of dollars subsidize what the little guys make so we can bring a million or 100 million of them into the community.“

„The big guys still make multiple times what they make anywhere else, so it’s a win-win scenario,“ he added.

Challenges to boosting adoption

In the mid-2010 transition from VoIP to crypto, Mashinsky said he underestimated the challenge of convincing ordinary people to commit to the decentralized economy.

„I thought it would be much easier than it is,“ he said. „I created Voice over IP in 1994, launched it, and then we started selling it around the world.“

„It was so easy to win customers because you said, ‚Why do you pay two dollars a minute to call the United States? Here’s a service that charges you 50 cents‘, it was very simple, and very, very fast, we had hundreds of millions of users around the world switching to VoIP for their communications.

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„I thought, ‚hey, how hard can it be to convince people to make 10 times what they make at their bank?“

However, Mashinsky stated that he quickly realized that „the VoIP bar is actually quite low because if something doesn’t work, you switch back to your operator, […] and everyone is happy.

Convincing people to give you their money involves raising a much higher bar than convincing people to switch from „carrier A to carrier B,“ he added.