Unbank the world with Alex Mashinsky

Alex Mashinsky, the serial US entrepreneur well known for installing broadband on the US subway, once famously declared Bitcoin the slowest database on the planet. It wasn’t until he understood it solved the issue of the digital double spend, that he got interested and when Mashinsky gets interested, he moves fast. The result is a Celsius Network, a crypto platform that has grown 20x in one year.

Coupled with his interest in crypto was a singular dislike of how the banking system served its customers, or rather it didn’t.

“I’m not alone in this opinion,” he says. “There was a recent survey where people said they’d rather visit the dentist than go sit with their bankers. We all have this visceral reaction.”

Right now the banking system is particularly broken. As he points out, people work hard, get paid a salary, lose half it in taxes and then people can’t earn any interest on their remaining money. Indeed in this zero/negative interest climate, their money is devalued on top of which they get charged all sorts of bank and credit card fees.

“The system is rigged. For most unaccredited investors you cannot participate in different investments, and you are excluded from value creation. That’s what we set up to change in Celsius. We are the opposite of Wall Street – where insiders get to call retail investors the plankton because they feed on them.

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Your host is Jillian Godsil, award winning journalist, broadcaster and author. Her latest book can be found at https://persons-of-interest.io/