A facet of the crashing crypto game (I really can’t call it a “market”) has reminded me of a journalistic failure a quarter of a century ago, a story that got away and ended up costing mugs millions of dollars.
A lesson from that failure was that a product that stinks is stinking for a good reason – there’s something putrid beneath it that will prove poisonous.
The current little stinker, in my opinion, is a crypto creature called Celsius Network. I hope, dear reader, you have no interest in it. Having zero knowledge of it is quite wise.
Celsius Network claims (or maybe claimed by the time you read this) to be a crypto lender with the ability to pay “depositors” a yield of “up to 18.63 per cent”.
Celsius also claimed to have assets of US$24 billion ($34.6 billion) in December – a figure that had halved by mid-May, the Financial Times reported, and would be substantially lower again now that it has had to suspend withdrawals and transfers.
Celsius was claiming a variety of high yields for various crypto deposits, but the “richest” was for a token called SNX. If you have nothing better to do, you could read (with a sack of pool salt) this recommendation for depositing SNX with Celsius, something supposedly “very easy, foolproof, and flexible”.
Yeah, sure. And I have a Harbour Bridge to sell you.
Celsius even claims (or claimed) to pay a yield of…
