 Hello, my name is Joe. I'm here today with Alex Moschinski, CEO of Celsius. We're gonna have an interesting conversation about custodian of custodian 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 Full house here. We took over we conquered the the Boris here in Paris Yeah, and we talk about, you know, normally we talk about how DeFi is gonna conquer Treadfy and that's what we've done here. We conquered the center of You know of Treadfy in Paris. Absolutely. It's a poetic sort of poetic win. Yes And just picking up on your your keynote yesterday You know, there was the axi-infinity hack recently where Vitalik's response was to say that, you know This 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 don't we totally agree with Vitalik and we built Celsius X The website is Celsius X.io. And if you are Celsius user, you can automatically basically take any of the assets you have Lock them and then we will wrap an issue natively issue assets on the blockchain So for example on polygon or or some other chain and the main advantage with that is that You don't use layer 2 bridges. So layer 2 bridges your one blockchain. I'm another blockchain We put a smart contract between us and we we basically so here it's 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 the back door or jumping through a window or whatever So so we're 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 2 bridging, right? It's unfortunately. It's not a solution because There's not going to be mass market adoption if half of the cars fall 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 Waiting for Vitalik to use it to wrap some ETH, you know, so driving the car over the bridge 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 a hundred percent defy. Yeah, see fine defy two sides of the same coin Mm-hmm, and you would sometimes you need to see five sometimes you need to use defy 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's what are you? Losing sleepover Yeah, so I'm a Ukrainian by birth, you know, and and obviously When the world goes to war, there's not just a war between Russia and Ukraine and 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 and here The crypto community came together very quickly, right? We we published an address I think a day after the war started with the Ukrainian Ministry Finance Ministry We we raised the help the Ukraine raised over 70 million dollars. I was at Bitcoin 2022 I just had an interview with the deputy minister about all this and they need more so yeah I'm calling on the community to you can find on my the links on my Twitter at machine ski or or You could also go to the official Ukrainian Ministry Twitter handle they have the BTC and ETH addresses published us DC as well So 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 yeah the Ukraine Crypto was there and they use they start using the money the next day. They're ready. They're buying food rations They were buying what they need for the hospitals for you know and so on yeah, absolutely I mean what do you think that says about the cryptocurrency industry in its reaction to you know 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 side show 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 bitcoins 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 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 was $33,000 and I was like No, this is the bottom, right? We're very strong support in that 30 to 33,000 sure and between Luna buying, you know billions of dollars over with a Bitcoin between a Lot of like you see here, right? I mean the show is it's a mob scene, right? And this is just institutional measure if they invited the retail guys, right? So this is all institutional a So I definitely think that 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 hasn't given up. That's not like they walked away, right? They're gonna come back and attack Ukraine again Everybody's preparing for it, but that's gonna 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 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 May break the 4500 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 we go to World War three, 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 no wood so can do it 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. Yeah, so you mentioned institutions being here We're in the former boss the former stock exchange What are you seeing from the institutional side right now? Are there any sort of triggers anything's any catalysts that you see that are bringing this new money into the space? So first is 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 with they're taking picture. They have one of these look long cameras taking picture of everybody walking in and out of their bores But the point is is that I think across the world both the 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 in its city adds Hire several hundred people for for the crypto desk, right? They understand that they're they're high net worth are asking for it. So they have to fill those orders They have to provide the service 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 Commodities you just go to your regular vendor say hey add the commodities module to my software Yeah, you flip a switch and you're in the commodities business. You can't do that with crypto right crypto is a completely different animal It's running on different rails different software, but they're coming that 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 banking friends own 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 gonna 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 it's a final question then I've asked you what you're losing sleep over What's getting like a baby? What's what's getting let me tell you why I'm sleeping like a baby because most people 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'm and I average in and I'm like It's very simple. Okay, if you bought some Bitcoin and you sleeping you 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 a sweet spot. It's just a sweet spot find that sweet spot sweet spot and And just stick with it because which 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 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 gonna sleep well at night and I can't find it So my conviction is much higher than most people. Yeah, and and the conviction is because our Traditional monetary system or tradfies is is rotten from the inside. It's it's you know under this I have a shirt that says banks are not your friends, you know and 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 they're not going to change that business model So you can't fix that right? That's what we're building a new system and in that new system Bitcoin is king you know, Ethereum is Queen and and Doge is the gesture and doze. Doze. 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 They making us lose customers look when you give somebody 10 10x leverage and they blow up They're never gonna come back to crypto. You lost them forever So we're 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 was Alex Mishinsky Sierra of Celsius even thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me