In 2018, Alex Mashinsky held a dinner at an upscale restaurant in New York. The entrepreneur’s goal was to attract “whales” — crypto-speak for large-scale currency holders who can move markets — to invest in a nascent entity he’d created called Celsius Networ .
The Ukraine-born, Israel-raised businessman spoke charmingly and passionately, according to a person who was at the dinner and described it on the condition of anonymity because it was a private event. He laid out his mission of “unbanking,” in which investors can deposit cryptocurrency outside the traditional financial system. Central to the pitch were unusually high yields for depositors in his Celsius Network — as much as 30 percent — made possible, the New York-based Mashinsky explained, because their money would be loaned out at high rates to those needing it for short-term crypto investments.Linc
