Take it away Matt Levine
Celsius Network LLC is (was?) a crypto brokerage that took crypto deposits from customers, paid 18% interest on those deposits and then invested the money in crypto loans and complex algorithmic trading strategies.
Okay let me stop there. Read that sentence again. What does it say? If you said “it says Celsius Network was a Ponzi scheme,” then, congratulations, you have been paying attention to crypto. Oh, I kid, I kid. Not every crypto banking platform is a Ponzi, and I don’t know if Celsius was. But the very least surprising piece of news in the whole world would be “this 18%-crypto-interest product was a Ponzi.” “Ooooooooh we will take your cryptocurrency and give you 18% interest on it by investing it in secret things”! I’m sorry! What do you think that means? “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying,” Celsius Chief Executive Officer Alex Mashinsky once told Bloomberg Businessweek, and I am pretty sure that as a matter of formal logic that statement reduces to “lol I’m running a Ponzi.”
