Prime Time Mashinsky: Bloomberg Buys Bitcoin Boom
Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky joins Bloomberg’s “What’d I Miss?” to announce $3.3B Chainalysis audit and comment on Q4 Bitcoin surge
This week I had the pleasure of joining Bloomberg TV’s “What’d I Miss?” to break some big news: the completion of an audit confirming over $3.3 Billion in assets held by Celsius. Our partner Chainalysis provided the first third-party verification of Celsius’ assets, based on transactions, total transfers and total withdrawals since launch of the service in June 2018.
Obviously, it’s an exciting day for us here at Celsius, and I was happy to give Bloomberg’s viewership the inside scoop on Celsius, talk about the Bitcoin bull run, and look at some of the factors that indicate that this year’s rally is no flash in the pan.
“Bitcoin is still the best-performing asset class across all categories for the last ten years. Every year in a row.”
The numbers don’t lie: Bitcoin is up over 100% this year alone, and it’s time that mainstream financial media treat it as a serious asset class, not a fluke. The boom-and-bust spike of 2017 was caused mainly by speculators. This year is different. Institutional and retail investors alike are increasingly looking to HODL Bitcoin as a long-term hedge against dollar inflation.
“Now that there are so many on-ramps to get to Bitcoin… all of that [represents] a much easier way [for retail investors] to find Bitcoin”
Check out this Google Trends search for “Bitcoin” in 2020. Over the past twelve months, we’ve seen a fairly steady rise in search queries that more or less match the growth of the asset. Now, compare that with the “pop” of Bitcoin searches in late 2017 that mirrors the boom-and-bust cycle we saw that year.
What does that tell us? Mainly that Bitcoin is a known quantity in 2020, helped along by the likes of household brands such as PayPal, Cash App and Line (a Celsius partner) entering the market and providing simple, user-friendly access points for individual Bitcoin trading.
These “on-ramps” didn’t exist in 2017, so trading was limited mainly to techies, crypto wonks and speculators. In 2020, consumer-friendly trading platforms have opened new opportunities for individual, diversified investors. Main Street is buying into Bitcoin — a sure sign of the long-term health of the asset.
“Bitcoin is an experiment. But the US Dollar… since we went off the gold standard, is also an experiment.”
I get asked how economists and investors can model Bitcoin to forecast where the currency is headed. It’s a funny question when you ask yourself this: can you create a fundamentals-based forecast model for any FIAT currency in 2020?
Consider this: the Federal Reserve has been “creating dollars from scratch at an unprecedented rate” to rescue the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic. Early estimates predict that by the end of the year, the Fed will have used newly printed money to purchase over $3.5 TRILLION in government securities as a measure to prop up the economy. It’s a recipe for inflation on an extraordinary scale.
The truth is that nobody knows where the dollar is headed. Savvy investors are asking themselves which is the better bet — buying into Bitcoin based on scarcity, or buying into the US dollar based on fiat decree?
My answer is this: In a year marked by economic misery, some of the world’s smartest investors are looking at these two options and determining that the changing winds and guaranteed scarcity of Bitcoin underpinning cryptocurrency is the safer bet as a source of long-term value. That’s why I’m all in on Bitcoin. I hope that you’ll join me on the ride.
