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A reminder before going into this article that none of this is financial advice, and should be used for entertainment and educational purposes only. As always, do your own research and find what investments might be best for you.
A Quick intro to Celsius
If you're unfamiliar with , it's essentially a centralized custodial wallet that allows you earn interest on your cryptocurrencies with some borrowing functions, similar to Nexo. They have some mediocre interest earning rates which I am assuming are subsidized by the fact that they charge absolutely no fees, including for any withdrawals or transfers. Its a trade-off that people have to weigh for themselves, because I'm assuming that for some people, moving ETH around with no fees alone might be worth it. Honestly if you haven't signed up for Celsius, it's relatively easy to make $50 dollars in BTC with your first deposit. Signup bonus aside, the only reason why I ever have any holdings in Celsius is to take advantage of their promotions.
Celsius' Promotions
This past week I received an e-mail highlighting Celsius' current promotions with AVAX and LUNA:
As I'll go into below, it takes a bit of math, but I highly recommend going through some of the numbers because with these promotions, you can earn some rates on your cryptocurrencies that are unparalleled elsewhere. On the flipside, it's especially important to pay attention to the holding requirement dates because that will significantly change your calculated APY rates.
One more thing to note is that you can do multiple promotions at the same time, but you can only qualify for them if you make separate deposits for each one you enter in your promo code. So for instance, if I wanted to qualify for AVAX 20 and AVAX 150, you would need to activate each promo code and make at least one deposit of $500 worth of AVAX and then a second deposit of at least $5000 worth of AVAX. In other words, you simply deposited $5000 worth of AVAX you could not qualify for both AVAX20 AVAX150.
AVAX promotions:
Now with AVAX, Celsius already has a base earn rate of 8.3% APY, regardless of whether you do the promotion or not, and you would be earning this on top of the promotion bonus you receive. So from interest alone, if you just held AVAX and took advantage of the AVAX20 promotion in your account you would be getting $9.92 worth of AVAX after 90 days:
Notice above the compounding frequency is set to 'weekly,' because this is how often Celsius pays out interest. So now using the same calculator let's add on the $20 promotion you would receive and recalculate the APY with the before mentioned normal APY rate:
For the 90-day promotion period, you would essentially earn a return of 26.60% APY on your AVAX. Not including AVAX Staker (which I'm staying away from because it sounds like ponzi-nomics to me with too much risk), the only other place I know that comes closest is , which offers 17%. Is 26.60% APY with little risk a good deal? I think it is. Now the numbers are obviously going to be different for the other promo codes, but I used the same calculations to see what the other AVAX promotions were paying out. In case you're curious they came out to be:
AVAX150 = 21.82% APY
AVAX600 = 14.73% APY
As you can see, the more you invest, the return rates actually start going down. With Midas' 17% as my benchmark, it seems clear that AVAX20 and AVAX150 are worth it, but beyond that, you might as well be putting them with Midas' 17%.
LUNA Promotions
Now the AVAX promotions have been around for some time, but the LUNA promotions are brand new, and when I initially saw that e-mail, I was super excited because I've been looking and researching for ways that might be best to increase my LUNA stack (article to come out about that later). The LUNA promotion is as follows:
Now you can tell right off the bat that LUNA's promotions might not be as profitable, because for LUNA150 and LUNA600, you need a 180-day lockup period. (Ok so technically not a "lockup" because you can withdraw at any time; in this case you just would be missing out on the promotion.) LUNA earns currently a 6.05% APY, so running the same math as we did for AVAX, the return rates on LUNA's promo codes comes out to:
LUNA20 = 24.07% APY
LUNA150 = 12.42% APY
LUNA600 = 12.42% APY
These are definitely not as good the AVAX ones, but they are significantly better than simply staking your LUNA on Terra Station to get the current 7-10%. But as i mentioned before, I'm working on an article that will come out soon of how you can earn 40-50% APY on your LUNA with significantly less risk than this, so if you're interested be sure to follow this blog.
Other things to consider
First, even if you're on the fence about any of these promotions, the promotions are all time limited and will/can expire without any notice. So even if you think there's only a small chance that you might do it, while you're thinking about it I would still sign up for them and activate the promo codes, just in case. Celsius tends not to post expiration dates for their promos and so by the time you get around to it weeks later, they may be gone and taken off the site altogether. This happened with a similar ETH promotion they ran in January that I really wished I registered for because I could have been making around 26% APY offf of my ETH.
Second, you might be wondering about price fluctuations. So for instance, if go into AVAX20, and the price moons during the 90-day promo period, what happens? Well as I mentioned before, your assets aren't actually locked into Celsisus so you can do whatever, whenever you want with them. Also, I may be mistaken, but the promotional amount is snapshotted when you qualify for the promotion. So your $20 of AVAX will be the price of $20 when you locked in your promotion, and there for may not be worth $20 after the 90-day period.
And lastly, let me reiterate that aside from fulfilling promotions, I would not stick any of my assets on Celsius, simply because I don't find it rewarding enough. I rather be staking them in liquidity pools, protocols like anchor, or putting them on higher-interest bearing platforms like
At this point, if you haven't signed up for Celsius and would like to, please consider supporting me and my blog and use my referral link: https://celsiusnetwork.app.link/117761912c. It's an easy way to make $50 in BTC with $400.
Besides that was there anything that I missed? Did my math suck? Let me know in the comments below!
