Celsius To Launch Cardano In August

Topics:

• Celsius’ tentative Cardano launch date
• Alternatives to Ethereum

Celsius’ Tentative Launch Date

While speaking with CryptosRus today, CEO of Celsius, Alex Mashinksy, revealed that Celsius is planning to integrate Cardano into the app this August. “We have everything worked out,” said Mashinsky. “Just have to finish the testing and launch.”

The prospective launch lines up with Cardano’s expected Goguen rollout coming in August. Celsius, which bills itself as a “global industry-leading cryptocurrency yield-earning platform”, previously announced in January that Cardano would come to the popular CeFi app in quarter 2.

“I think Charles is an amazing leader. He has an amazing community. A lot of those members are also Celsians,” Mashinsky added. He added that, “We are collaborating with Cardano on several fronts, not just listing them in the wallet.” No yield rates announced yet, but other similar projects like Ethereum and Polkadot generate 5.35% and 8.86% APY respectively.

On a related note, Input Output HK (IOHK) announced yesterday that one of Celsius’ peers, Nexo, formed a partnership with Cardano. The partnership includes earning interest and borrowing against the ADA token. However, IOHK didn’t specify if Nexo planned to stay on the Ethereum chain.

Alternatives to Ethereum

While Mashinsky didn’t go into specifics about what exactly “not just listing them in the wallet” means, he did hint in the past about migrating from Ethereum.

During a chat with Charles Hoskinson on Crypto Crow’s YouTube channel, Mashinsky said, “If we can’t scale on Ethereum, of course we will migrate somewhere else. We can’t scale with the system we have today.”

Mashinsky cited hour-long confirmations and the high gas fees as the main issues. Ethereum’s gas fees are especially an issue because Celsius offers free withdrawals to its customers. At the time of the January episode, the cost to Celsius was an estimated 2.5 million USD a year, when gas fees averaged around a 125 GWEI. Gas fees rose as high as 300 in May.

However,  Mashinsky stopped short of making any official announcement then that he would be migrating Celsius to the Cardano chain. But he did provide a potential solution: “Maybe we run it [CEL token] on two chains?”

Regardless of how the final integration into Celsius looks, it’s likely to go beyond just allowing their customers to trade Cardano.