Some of the largest cryptocurrency hacks in history happened in crypto’s more recent years, and hackers have managed to pry apart hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other currencies from a multitude of exchanges. 

Some platforms are fully refunded by honorable hackers, and in likely cases, they are not, and many platforms attempt to make their users whole by reimbursing them with the company’s revenue.

Realistically, many losses are never recovered. To completely understand these cryptocurrency thefts, we’ve examined the largest crypto hacks in history, how they happened, and the methods that have been taken to prevent them from happening again. 

The 8 Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History By Value

#1 Poly Network Hack, $610M

#2 Coincheck Hack, $533M

#3 Mt Gox Hack, $470M

#4 The Wormhole Hack, $321M

#5 KuCoin Hack, $281M

#6 Bitmart Hack, $196M

#7 Bitfinex Hack, $72M

#8 The DAO Hack, $70M

Chronological List Of The Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History

Here’s a chronological table of the largest cryptocurrency hacks in history and how they happened. We’ve also attached their rank by value (i.e., the amount initially stolen by hackers.) 

Editor’s note: The cryptocurrency world has undergone hundreds of hacks. Information on the current dollar value of assets compromised in each hack varies due to the versatility of cryptocurrencies, so we’ve ranked each hack by the value of the theft at its occurrence, heedless of whether or not funds were recovered.  While we’ve done our best to find and share the vulnerability exploited by hackers, it was not possible to find out exactly how a hack happened in many cases. 

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History: Mt Gox’s Legendary Losses

Ranked #3, the Mt Gox hack was the first significant digital currency theft, and it remains one of the most well-known. 

Once the world’s largest exchange, Mt Gox was a company in Tokyo, Japan. At one point in its four-year reign, this now-defunct crypto trader handled nearly 70% of all Bitcoin transactions. 

In 2006, Mt Gox was set up by a programmer named Jed McCaleb. The site was initially meant to serve as a card exchanging platform for the popular card game “Magic: The Gathering,” which is the story behind its name. “Mt. Gox” stands for Magic: The Gathering — Online eXchange.

However, in July 2010, McCaleb (who went on to found Ripple) published what would become the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange on the same domain after reading about Bitcoin and realizing that the crypto community needed a “good way to buy and sell Bitcoins.” 

Later, McCaleb sold his project to French programmer and entrepreneur Mark Karpeles. After this sale, McCaleb retained admin rights to audit transactions and remained entitled to Mt Gox’s profits for six months.

While Mt Gox grew to become a massive crypto trading giant, its backend development processes stalled under Karpeles’ management. This led to a series of successful cyber attacks occurring between the first confirmed security breach in 2011 and continuing until a massive heist in 2014. 

In total, Mt Gox’s attackers made off with about 744,000 bitcoins, or approximately $460 million. This amount, huge then, comes up to a colossal $28.1 billion lost today, making this one of the hugest cryptocurrency hacks in history.

How the Mt Gox hack happened

Exact facts about the vulnerabilities exploited in each of Mt Gox’s hacks are scarce. However, it is abundantly clear that there were many vulnerabilities to exploit. Anonymous insiders reported that the exchange lacked such basic (and vital) features as version control software and — until a few months before its fall — a test environment.

Without version control, one Mt Gox developer could accidentally modify another’s code. There was no history of changes or reliable mechanism for merging code or reverting to a known working copy. Since it lacked a test environment, Mt Gox put this largely untested software in front of the general public. 

Furthermore, Mark Karpeles was the only individual with access rights to approve changes to the site’s source code, and he was not always an active part of its development. This meant that bug fixes — even updates for security — were delayed for days, even weeks.

Somehow even worse, the company had no accounting system for reconciling its offline BTC balances for inventory, its online BTC balance for liquidity, and its fiat cash balance for currency exchange. 

The First Mt Gox Thefts

Mt Gox went through a flurry of hacks in 2011. 

First, on 13 June 2011, the exchange reported that attackers had stolen about 25,000 BTC (approximately $400,000 at the time) from 478 user accounts. Then, four days later, an anonymous user who called themselves “~cRazIeStinGer~” posted an offer to sell the platform’s entire user database on Pastebin. This was a massive threat, but the company did not respond.

The next day, Mt Gox reported more thefts. Then, on Sunday, June 19, suspicious trading activity started on the exchange. Someone had placed a series of orders to sell hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. 

These orders triggered a flash BTC price drop, causing the nominal value of BTC on the exchange to drop from $17 to around one cent. The largest sale executed was for 261, 383.7630 BTC, which constituted about 4% of the 6.5 million bitcoins in circulation at the time.

As the news traveled, Mt Gox and other BTC exchanges experienced extreme volatility, with the price of Bitcoin fluctuating between $1 and $20.

The hacker achieved this by compromising Jed McCaleb’s Mt Gox auditor account, using it to transfer an enormous amount of BTC to another wallet. As the BTC price dropped, they used the exchange to sell these coins, purchasing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins at one cent each. 

In response, Karpeles shut the Mt Gox site down.

Later that day, the hacker made good on their threat, publishing a list of all Mt Gox’s user’s details — featuring all usernames, email addresses, and password hashes — on an internet forum. The list contained the details of 61,016 accounts, with an equivalent balance of $8.75 million. This release led to the loss of about 2000 BTC or $30,000 at the time.

Several other exchanges voluntarily shut down as a security response since many users used multiple exchanges for trading and likely used similar security information.

A few hours later, Mt Gox began disclosing the attack to its users, making security recommendations and warning them of possible phishing attacks. 

Two days later, the company started accepting account recovery requests from users, allowing them to prove their claim by verifying their email address, sharing previous passwords, and — optionally — further evidence such as their last-known Mt Gox balance, a copy of government ID, and more. The company verified these claims manually.

On June 23, Mt Gox executed a transfer of 424242.42424242 BTC from cold storage to the exchange to prove that the Bitcoins were still under Mt Gox’s control. Three days later, they reopened for business, rolling back fraudulent trades (at their own expense) and introducing new security measures, including a more secure password hashing algorithm.

They also updated their user verification methods during a first-time login to include users sharing the last IP address that accessed their account and verifying the email address, account name, and old password. Then, users were prompted to enter a new, strong password.

Mt Gox’s reputation recovered from this hack well. Within hours of the site coming back online, the price of BTC stabilized at around $16.50, and there were no massive user withdrawals or huge asset sell-offs by users.

The long haul

Mt Gox’s 2011 hacks did not end there. Research by WizSec shows that in September 2011, a malicious entity gained access to Mt Gox’s wallet.dat file. 

A wallet.dat file contains vital data used by the cryptocurrency wallet on your computer. This file includes information like the public/private key pairs for each of your addresses, transactions you’ve made, and more. 

With the data on its unencrypted wallet.dat file, the hacker gained access to a large amount of BTC owned by Mt Gox and the private keys to the company’s hot wallets. Mt Gox used these wallets to store funds securely online. With the wallets compromised, the hackers were free to slowly empty them of funds every time the company made a deposit.

Slowly but surely, the hackers stole over 650,000 bitcoins from Mt Gox’s hot wallets and — due to the company’s neglect of fiduciary duty — went undetected for years: from early 2012 till Mt Gox’s crash in February 2014.

On 24 February 2014, Mt Gox suspended its trading and went offline. Four days later, it filed for bankruptcy protection, reporting that it had lost almost 750,000 customer BTC and 100,000 of its own. 

This loss came to about 7% of all bitcoins in circulation, around $473 million. In March 2014, the company shared that it had found around 200,000 BTC in an old wallet, bringing the stolen assets down to 650,000 BTC.

How did the Mt Gox episode resolve? 

To date, most Mt Gox users are awaiting reimbursement for their losses. After a short stint in jail in 2015 for fraud and embezzlement, Mark Karpeles is still on trial in the Mt Gox case. 

At a creditors meeting in October 2021, it was announced that Mt Gox’s bankruptcy trustees will begin compensating creditors using the company’s remaining assets. This Civil Rehabilitation Plan was officially approved in November 2021 and plans to provide billions of dollars in compensation to disgruntled ex-customers of the exchange.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History: The Bitfinex Hack

At #7, Bitfinex is the world’s second-largest Bitcoin heist.

 Founded in 2012, Bitfinex is a Hong Kong-based exchange with many cryptocurrency products and trading options. Once the eighth largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world — and the largest exchange operating in USD — the company was hacked in August 2016 to the tune of 119,756 BTC or $72 million at the time. Today, a hack of that size would mean a loss of about $4.5 billion.

How Bitfinex was hacked

Years after it occurred, the exact weakness that led to Bitfinex’s hack has still not been discovered. However, the hack exploited a vulnerability in Bitfinex’s multi-signature (multi-sig) accounts. 

In a partnership heralded as the future of Bitcoin security, Bitfinex and BitGo developed a multi-signature wallet system that protects against hacks by giving each customer their own secure wallet. Three (instead of one) private keys are required to validate a transaction. Bitfinex held two private keys needed to sign trade for this security method to work, and BitGo had the third.

Multisig wallets are notoriously safer than regular ones and are widely used today. The vulnerability exploited in this case seems to stem from Bitfinex’s implementation of the highly configurable technology. While Bitfinex’s keys were compromised, BitGo reported no suspicious activity on its servers.

The Bitfinex hack resolution

In contrast to Mt Gox’s still-ongoing restitution, Bitfinex handled its loss well, announcing that it had reimbursed all creditors just eight months later.

The company achieved this by spreading the loss over its entire customer base. Each customer experienced a loss of about 36% of their assets. Bitfinex then issued Bitfinex (BFX) tokens to customers, to the tune of each loss. Affected customers received 1 BFX for each $1 lost and could redeem their BFX for crypto using the exchange or for shares of Bitfinex’s parent company, iFinex. 

Soon after the hack, the stolen Bitfinex bitcoins were blacklisted as stolen cryptocurrencies, meaning that exchanges will not allow users to trade them. While the blacklisted assets seem to have been moved by the bad actors, it’s still unclear if or how they might be able to cash out on the stolen coins.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History: The DAO Hack

Ranked #8, the DAO hack is the largest Ethereum hack in history.

The DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Network) was an immensely popular entity designed to be an unaffiliated, decentralized, and autonomous venture capital fund. It operated based on fully transparent rules enforced and maintained by smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain network. Any changes were made via a vote by all investors.

Inspired by decentralization, The DAO aimed to improve investments by removing human error from the decision-making process. It allowed individuals to invest anonymously from anywhere in the world and garnered a lot of public attention during its initial funding.

The DAO was launched in May 2016, and investors began sending funds to its smart contracts. It was funded by a 28-day sale of its DAO token and attracted more than 18,000 investors. 

Figures on the value of the DAO’s campaign are varied; one source records that it had attracted about 12.7 million ETH or $250 million at the end of its campaign, while another puts the figures at 11.5 million ETH, about $163 million.

Nevertheless, the DAO’s crowdfunding was the largest ever recorded at that time, with its investments making up nearly 14% of all ETH in circulation as of the token sale. 

Then, on June 17, hackers used a vulnerability discovered in its code to drain the DAO’s smart contract of 3.6 million ETH (about $70 million.) 

How the DAO hack happened

The DAO contained an exit door so investors could opt out. It was called the splitDao function, and, once called, allowed an investor to withdraw their ETH and, if they wished to, create a “child” DAO by inviting other DAO token holders.

There was only one takeback. If you chose to split from DAO, you would be unable to withdraw your ETH holdings for the standard waiting period before your “child” DAO’s launch: 28 days.

According to a paper published in May 2016, the DAO had serval security risks and other loopholes. Of note was a bug known as the “recursive call” vulnerability. It would allow potential attackers to repeatedly call a function from within the function itself. This would put the operation on a loop; each call was multiplied, meaning that the process would be triggered repeatedly.

The recursive call vulnerability was publicized severally until The DAO creators acknowledged it, sharing that they had issued a fix.

It would soon become apparent that they had not.

In the July 17 hack, the attacker exploited several vulnerabilities, especially the recursive call. By recursively calling the splitDAO function, they could “withdraw” their funds several times before the smart contract updated its balance. The hacker had transferred about $3.6 million into their new “child” DAO by the next day.

Resolution

Because of the way the DAO’s smart contract worked, the hacker was unable to withdraw their stolen funds for 28 days. Technically, the funds hadn’t left The DAO. 

The Ethereum network was divided on what to do next. Many users called for the series of transactions leading to the hack to be rolled back, but others were more inclined to let The DAO deal with its crisis, as the hack was an exploitation of a valid weakness in its software.

Eventually, the Ethereum community almost unanimously voted in favor of a hard fork to roll back the effects of the DAO hack. The recovered Ether was released into a smart contract that allowed the affected users to retrieve their assets.

Those who did not switch to the Ethereum fork continue using the original Ethereum blockchain, known as Ethereum Classic. 

After its hack, several prominent exchanges delisted The DAO’s tokens, and the platform as it was initially intended has not been visualized to date.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History: Coincheck’s Multi-Million Dollar Hack

At #2, Coincheck’s hack is a case study on the importance of thorough security.

Somehow even larger than Mt Gox’s almost three-year hack is Coinckeck’s 2018 loss. 

Coincheck is a Japanese exchange and wallet provider that remains one of the world’s most prominent today. In 2017, Coincheck handled the highest volume of cryptocurrency trades in Asia. Then, in January 2018, the company announced that it had lost $534 million in what has been heralded as the “largest digital currency theft” in history.

How the Coincheck hack happened

Rather than more valuable cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether, the mind-boggling sum stolen in Coincheck’s hack was composed entirely of NEM (also known as XEM) tokens — specifically, 523 million of them.

Around 3:00 a.m. local time on 26 January 2018, a malicious entity transferred over half a billion dollars worth of user NEM tokens out of a compromised Coincheck hot wallet, to 11 external addresses.

The hack went unnoticed till near midday.

Most of the blame for this can be placed on the surface-level security Coincheck was implementing at the time. Rather than secure its NEM tokens in offline cold wallets — or in secure multi-sig wallets as recommended by NEM itself — Coincheck stored a majority of its clients’ NEM in one online hot wallet protected by a single private key. Admitting its faults, Coincheck blamed a staff shortage for the lack of vigilance that allowed this tremendous loss.

To access its hot wallet, attackers sent phishing emails to Coincheck’s employees, using this to collect information they needed to install malware that would let them clean out Coincheck’s online NEM store.

Once the breach was discovered, Coincheck froze all deposits and withdrawals.

Resolution

Soon after Coincheck announced the hack, the value of NEM dropped by nearly 20%. While it would have been possible to retrieve the stolen NEM in a move similar to what occurred after the DAO hack, NEM developers opted against hard-forking their blockchain to roll back the transactions, as they were under no obligation to do so. 

Following the attack, NEM developers created an automated tagging system to track the coins and tag any account that receives them, effectively blocklisting the stolen tokens.

In April 2018, Coincheck was sold to Monex Group, which soon began reimbursing customers affected by the hack with $0.83 for each NEM token lost. The company has since repaid all 260,000 customers who lost assets in the hack.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks in History: KuCoin

Ranked #5, KuCoin’s hack represents half of all crypto stolen in 2020.

Founded in 2013, KuCoin is a Seychelles-based cryptocurrency exchange that was hacked to the tune of $280 million in September 2020. 

The company lost 1,008 BTC; alongside 14,713 BSV; 9,588,383 XLM; 26,733 LTC; Omni, and EOS-based tether (USDT) worth $14 million; $153 million worth of ETH and ERC20s; and over 18 million XRP.

How the Kucoin hack happened

The exact details of how KuCoin’s hack was carried out are murky. Experts suggest that the attackers may have been North Korean Lazarus Group, but are still largely unsure about the specific weaknesses exploited. 

Nevertheless, it’s clear that the attackers gained access to the private keys to KuCoin’s hot wallets. Some sources suggest that KuCoin’s hack may have been an inside job, while others speculate that hackers might have stolen the private keys using a social engineering attack: a phish, malware, or by building a backdoor into a responsible employee’s account.

Resolution

Kucoin has fully refunded customers who were affected by the hack. The exchange was able to do this largely through the cooperation of the developers of the stolen crypto, who updated their smart contracts or performed “token swaps,” which allowed them to roll back KuCoin’s losses and replace the stolen coins. 

While this meant less loss for the giant exchange, it (and other questionable actions the company allegedly took to urge the smaller companies to cooperate) has raised questions about KuCoin and the stolen tokens themselves, with some saying that the company’s actions went against cryptocurrencies core principle: Decentralization. 

KuCoin worked with project and law enforcement partners to fully reimburse its customers to recover $222 million (about 78%) and $17.45 million (6%,) respectively. The company then covered the remaining 16% — about $45.55 million — from its insurance fund.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks in History: PolyNetwork

Ranked #1, Poly Network said, “Can’t beat them? Ask them to join you.”

Poly Network is a cross-chain network founded by Chinese entrepreneur Da Hongfei. The company built a cross-chain network to enable blockchain users to exchange cryptocurrencies without using a centralized platform (i.e., an exchange,) allowing users to avoid high exchange fees.

How the PolyNetwork hack happened

Blockchain networks are inherently independent. Each blockchain is its own ledger, and nodes cannot understand or process data on another blockchain. For example, Alice cannot transfer Bitcoin to her Ethereum address and have that BTC automatically converted to ETH and added to her wallet. This is because the nodes that process transactions on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains cannot communicate. 

Picture two blockchain networks, say Bitcoin and ethereum, running parallel to each other. Poly network’s cross-chain sits on top of them, acting as a bridge connecting the Bitcoin blockchain’s Bitcoin addresses to the Ethereum addresses on the Ethereum blockchain.

The platform works by building smart contracts. For example, a smart contract might allow nodes on Poly’s cross-chain to accept Bitcoin from a node Bitcoin’s blockchain, input that BTC into one of Poly’s wallets, and then send a corresponding amount of ETH from one of Poly’s ETH wallets to an address on the Ethereum blockchain. 

For this to work, Poly Network keeps a large sum of liquid assets (online cryptocurrency) so they always have enough crypto to complete a transaction.

The hacker was able to gain “owner” access rights to one of Poly’s smart contracts by exploiting vulnerabilities in Poly’s systems. 

The most notable vulnerability was that Poly Network mismanaged the access rights between two high-privileged smart contracts. 

One contract was responsible for sending messages to/from the Ethereum blockchain and Poly’s cross-chain. Let’s call it the “Poly-ETH messaging contract.” 

The other was a high-profile smart contract that contained the keys to Poly’s online liquidity reserves, including an Ethereum wallet, a Binance wallet, a Neo wallet, and a Tether wallet. We’ll call it the piggybank contract. It contained a hidden function that issued ownership rights to anyone who triggered it. However, that function could only be initiated by someone with those rights. 

Three things to note:

• The Poly-ETH messenger contract had ownership rights to the piggybank, meaning it could issue high-privilege commands to the piggybank contract.
• The piggybank contained a hidden function that granted ownership access to anyone who knew it.
• The hidden function that issued ownership rights to the piggy bank could be revealed using a brute-force attack.

Once he had discovered these vulnerabilities, the attacker found the piggybank’s hidden function using a brute-force attack and then used the Poly-ETH contract to give himself ownership rights to the piggybank. 

Then, he transferred $610  million worth of cryptocurrency from Poly’s Ethereum, Binance, Neo, Tether, and other reserves using the rights he now had.

Resolution

In a shocking turn of events, the hacker, who has been dubbed “Mr. Whitehat,” began returning the stolen funds to Poly’s hot wallets, eventually returning the entire sum. In explanation, he stated that the hack was “a joke, and meant to encourage Poly Network to improve its security.” 

The company rewarded Mr. Whitehat with $500,000 as a bounty for discovering the bug and offered him a spot on its security team.   

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks in History: BitMart

Ranked #6, Bitmart’s hack 2021’s most significant crypto loss.

Bitmart is a cryptocurrency exchange domiciled in the Cayman Islands. Founded in 2017, the company was hacked in early December 2021, losing nearly $200 million in various cryptocurrencies.

How the BitMark hack happened.

On 4 December 2021, security analysis firm Peckshield tweeted that it had noticed suspicious activity involving one of Bitmart’s addresses. Funds were being transferred out of the company’s hot wallets to an Ethereum address named “Bitmart Hacker.” In another tweet, the company estimated that Bitmart had lost about $100 million from their ETH hot wallet and about $96 million from their Binance Smart Chain (BSC) wallet.

Bitmart soon denounced these claims as “fake news” on a telegram channel. 

Hours later, it announced that a security analysis had revealed “a large-scale security breach,” reporting a loss of about $150M.

At the final tally, Bitmart had lost a total of $196 million in over 20 different cryptocurrencies, most notably Ether and Shiba Inu. 

While it’s clear that the hacker was able to access the private keys to its hot wallets, Bitmart either doesn’t know or has not reported how the attacker gained that access.

Resolution

Soon after the hack, the attacker used a decentralized exchange aggregator to slowly swap the stolen tokens for ETH. Then, the attacker sent the coins to a private mixer that allowed them to mix the stolen coins with clean ones, making Bitmart’s stolen assets harder to trace.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History: Wormhole

Ranked #4, the Wormhole hack was one of the first major cryptocurrency losses in 2022

Launched in September 2021, Wormhole is a popular blockchain bridge. It’s a cross-chain network that connects different blockchain networks, allowing users to access the value of their crypto assets on the supported blockchains. 

The platform works by freezing a user’s assets on one platform, and then issuing them assets on the other network. 

For example, an ETH user who wanted to access their ETH tokens on the Solana network would have to lock up their ETH tokens on Wormhole’s smart contract. Once a majority of Wormhole’s “guardians” — the platform’s 19 cross-chain validators — consent that assets have been locked on one network, the bridge would mint a comparable amount of wormhole-wrapped tokens on the Solana network and send them to the user’s Solana account. 

The user can then trade the issued tokens for SOL, and to restore their original assets, they would have to burn the wrapped assets (which would again be validated by the guardian network), and Wormhole would return their original tokens.

To reiterate, here’s the three-step process:

1. Lock up assets 
2. Mint-wrapped tokens on the target blockchain
3. Burn wrapped tokens and get your original assets back

Between each of these stages, Wormhole’s guardians ensure that the messages received (whether the assets have been locked or burnt) are valid.

On February 2nd, 2022, Wormhole announced via tweet that it was undergoing maintenance to investigate “a potential exploit” of its systems. Soon, it was revealed that an attacker had been able to exploit a vulnerability on the platform’s Solana-Ethereum bridge, and had successfully minted 120,000 invalid Wormhole ETH on the Solana network. 

Then, in two transactions, the attacker withdrew 93,750ETH to his ETH address (even though these assets technically didn’t exist) using Wormhole’s system and sold the rest for SOL, amounting to a loss of about $320M.

How the Wormhole Hack Happened

The hacker was able to trick Wormhole’s system into believing that its guardians had signed off on a 120,000 deposit into their (the hacker’s) account on Solana due to a vulnerability in their system.

Wormhole was using a function that was meant to check that a guardian had signed a transaction (effectively approving it). However, this function (load_instruction_at) was deprecated somewhat because while it checks for a signature, it does not check that it’s executing against the right system address.

Simply put, the hacker was able to get away with using a forged guardian signature. Wormhole’s systems believed that its guardians had locked up 120,000 ETH, so when the hacker requested that his fake funds be returned to his ETH address as real ETH, Wormhole’s smart contracts complied, allowing the attacker to drain the cross-chain of its ETH holdings. 

Resolution

A digital $1 in your bank account is only worth a dollar because your bank holds the physical representation in its vaults. In the same vein, the value of Wormhole wETH is pegged to the amount of ETH held by the bridge. Therefore, when the hacker drained the bridge of ETH, inflation caused the value of Wormhole wETH to drop drastically. 

Soon after the hack had been confirmed, Wormhole announced that it would soon refill its vaults and bring the value of Wormhole wETH back to 1 ETH. At first, it was unclear where they would find $320M of ETH to fulfill that promise.

Then, Jump Crypto, the venture capital firm that owns Wormhole’s developing company, stepped in and restored all lost assets.
Wormhole has since offered the hacker a bounty of $10M for finding the hack (in return for returning the stolen assets — negotiations are ongoing) and is working on tightening its security to prevent such a breach from reoccurring.

Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History And How They Happened: Final Thoughts

The cryptocurrency industry has been shaken, but recovered, from some pretty big crypto hacks. It’s one industry that seemingly regularly experiences large financial losses as a result of cyberattacks. Specifically, a majority of those hacks occurred on an exchange, due to a compromised online hot wallet, pointing to a recurring point of failure.

If you’re investing in cryptocurrency, you’re probably already aware that, unlike fiat (regular currency) investments, your crypto cannot be FDIC or SDIC insured. That leaves insurance up to the platform: exchange, wallet, project, etc., that you’re using, and means that investing in crypto inherently involves more risk than fiat investments do. 

Do your best to keep your assets secure.

• Protect your private key using a secure offline hardware wallet or wallet software that secures your keys in cold storage.
• If you can avoid storing your cryptocurrency on an exchange, do so.
• Do your research: always find out how secure (and insured) a platform is, and make sure you understand how it protects your assets.

If you’d like to move your crypto from an exchange to a secure hardware wallet, here are the best cryptocurrency wallets you can use.

The post Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks In History: How They Happened appeared first on CoinCentral.

If you’ve been part of the cryptoverse for an extended period, you’ve probably heard of the scalability trilemma.

The scalability issue: the three primary characteristics of a mature blockchain network (scalability, security, and decentralization) are impossible to achieve simultaneously using today’s technology, particularly Proof of Work (PoW), the consensus algorithm employed by Bitcoin.

For instance, Ethereum, the world’s leading blockchain network, is plagued by scaling issues largely linked to its PoW and is attempting to solve the issue by employing Proof of Stake (PoS). 

Since it was coined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in 2015, an entire subsector of cryptocurrency projects devoted to solving the scalability trilemma has emerged. 

One other project devoted to solving this trilemma, and our focus in this review, is MultiversX. 

What is MultiversX (Elrond)?

Announced in 2019 under the name Elrond,  MultiversX describes itself as a scalable, fast, and secure blockchain platform for distributed apps, enterprise use cases, and the new internet economy. 

Elrond claims to solve the scalability trilemma with a 1000x improvement in blockchain speed, scale, cost, and user experience.

That sounds great, but…

How Does MultiversX Even Work?

The name of MultiversX’s game is increasing throughput, or the entire network’s transactions per second, with a scaling technique called Adaptive State Sharding. It also introduces a novel approach to consensus called Secure Proof of Stake (SPoS).

To completely understand MultiversX, you’ll have to understand these two technologies, how they differ from current sharding and consensus methods, and why those differences are essential for scaling, as well as the Elrond (EGLD) coin. 

Now, how does MultiversX work?

How MultiversX Uses Adaptive State Sharding

The optimal approach to blockchain sharding needs to take into consideration the advantages of all three sharding types: 

• State sharding, where the “state” or history of the entire network is split across different “shards” or sections of the network. Each shard has its history/ledger, and nodes (computers connected to the network) only need to hold the state of the shard they are in, dramatically reducing the amount of latent storage capacity they require.
• Transaction sharding, in which transactions are mapped to shards for processing based on criteria like the sender’s address, and each shard processes transactions in parallel to other shards. Here, each node keeps a record of the state of the entire network.
• Network sharding handles the way nodes are grouped into shards and can optimize communication, as sending messages to nodes in a shard can be done much faster than to the entire network.

Adaptive state sharding works as a solution to the scalability conundrum by improving communication inside shards and increasing the network’s performance and efficiency. It does this by combining all three sharding types into a solution that enables parallel processing on all levels. 

Shards are smaller sections of MultiversX network and are used for scaling. Each shard handles a portion of the state (accounts, smart contracts, blockchain) and transaction processing so that each shard can process only a fraction of the transactions in parallel with other shards.

Secure proof of stake(SPoS)

SPoS is MultiversX’s approach to consensus. It eliminates PoW computational waste by combining eligibility through stake (here, a forger, similar to a miner, is more likely to create a block depending on the amount of currency they hold and how long they have kept it compared to other forgers) and rating – the basis for Proof of Stake – with random validator selection, and an optimal dimension for the consensus group. 

MultiversX’s BFT-like consensus protocol maintains a high-security level by randomly sampling the consensus group and randomly shuffling nodes into other shards to prevent collusion. It uses an unbiasable, unpredictable randomness source generated by the block proposer via signing the previous random source.

The MultiversX VM

The MultiversX Virtual Machine is a dedicated smart contract execution engine built on WebAssembly (WASM). It expands the languages available to smart contract developers, including Rust, C/C++, C#, and Typescript. Developers can write smart contracts in any language they are familiar with, compile them on WASM, and easily debug its WAT human-readable format.

Metachain 

A Metachain is a blockchain that runs in a unique shard. Here, the responsibilities are not processing transactions but notarising and finalizing the processed shard block headers. 

Other tasks include:

• Facilitating communication between shards.
• Storing and maintaining a registry of validators.
• Triggering new epochs.
• Processing fisherman challenges.
• Slashing and rewarding.

Nodes

A node can be anything from a computer, smartphone, or server running the MultiversX client and relaying messages received from its peers. 

Nodes can fulfill a Validator, Observer, or Fisherman role, providing different support levels to the network and earning proportional rewards.

Validators are nodes on the MultiversX network who have put up collateral (or ‘stake’) in the form of EGLD tokens to become eligible to process transactions and participate in the consensus mechanism. They are rewarded from protocol and transaction fees and stand to lose their stake if they conspire to disrupt the network.

Observers are nodes without a stake. They are passive members of the network that can act as a read-and-relay interface. Observers are either Full: keeping the entire history of the blockchain or Light: keeping only two epochs of blockchain history. Observers are not rewarded for their participation.

A Fisherman is a node that verifies the validity of blocks after they have been proposed. They challenge invalid blocks (false transactions) created by malicious actors and are rewarded in EGLD. Fishermen can be validators who are not part of the current consensus round or observers.

The EGLD Coin

The EGLD (“Electronic Gold”) coin is MultiversX’s native currency. It powers the MultiversX network by serving as a medium of exchange between users and developers – who pay transaction fees to use the network, and validators – who take those fees as payment for the services they provide. 

The MultiversX network provides a platform to deploy smart contracts, decentralized applications (or dApps), and even entire blockchain protocols. However, the EGLD coin is the unit of value that enables these activities. EGLD governs the network through staking and validator rewards and as payment for transactions and smart contracts.

The MultiversX Team

MultiversX was co-founded in late 2017 by Beniamin and Lucian Mincu, alongside Lucian Todea. 

Before MultiversX, the brothers co-founded MetaChain Capital, a digital asset investment fund, and ICO Market Data, which aggregates information around initial coin offerings. Todea is the Founder/CEO of Soft32, a software review and download site, and a partner of mobilPay, a mobile payments application. 

The MultiversX team comprises 27 developers, designers, and engineers from Intel, Microsoft, ITNT, and Soft32. It also contains seven advisors from popular companies like Google, NASA, (and) Ethereum, and experts from George Mason University (GMU) and the University of Illinois (UI). Among these advisors is the founding duo of City of Zion and NEX, Fabio Canesin and Ethan Fast. 

MultiversX isn’t the only network trying to solve the scalability trilemma. Similar projects with a take on the future of secure, scalable cryptocurrencies include more popular projects like Ethereum and Algorand.

Here’s how MultiversX compares to other scaling solutions

MultiversX vs. Algorand

The first and most notable difference between Algorand and MultiversX is sharding – or its absence. The Algorand blockchain does not implement any sharding technology and is based on the pure Proof of Stake (PPoS) consensus algorithm. 

In Algorand, transactions are approved and verified by randomly selected node committees. This is aided by a custom-made verification feature called Verifiable Random Function (VRF). VRF ensures that the process of committee selection is transparent but private by functioning similar to a lottery – randomly choosing ‘leaders’ to propose a block and committee members to vote on that block.

To inform each selected validator of the other validators, they’ll be performing consensus with; consensus messages have to be propagated to the entire network – leading to slower consensus.

Consequently, the selection of validators in Algorand can take up to 12 seconds. On the other hand, in MultiversX, a given shard will achieve selection and consensus in ~4 seconds. Although Algorand’s throughput peaks at 926 TPS, these differences mean that it’s still nowhere near MultiversX’s current peak of 263,000 TPS.

As we established earlier, MultiversX throughput will increase linearly to the number of shards on the network. In Algorand, this throughput can only decrease as nodes increase – without sharding technology, nodes will soon reach storage and communication limits.

MultiversX vs. Ethereum 2.0 (Serenity)

Ethereum’s 2.0 upgrade, a.k.a Serenity, is currently in Phase 1 testing and aims to improve throughput by implementing a PoS consensus algorithm and sharding technology.

The key differences between these two networks are in transactions per second (TPS), sharding implementation, scaling capabilities, and security.

Serenity will run a predetermined set of 1024 shards when launched, which raises concerns (explained below) about security if nodes leave the system. 

Shards have a minimum number of nodes per shard. This ensures they are safe from attacks by malicious actors. If nodes leave the Ethereum 2.0 network, this will force some shards to go beneath the minimum number of nodes to maintain the 1024 shard count. 

In contrast, MultiversX adaptive state sharding allows shards to merge or split to maintain the optimum number of nodes in a shard. As a result, the network scales down on shard count as shards leave – or creates more shards as more nodes join.

Another difference to note is in transaction speed. Ethereum currently runs at a transaction speed of 20 TPS, but with the implementation of the Serenity upgrade, it will conduct up to 10,000 transactions per second.

At launch, the MultiversX mainnet ran at 15,000 TPS. Its scalability has been proven in a public testnet with 50 shards that run at 263,000 TPS – 10 times more than the international payment system, Visa, which can process up to 25,000 transactions each second, and a 10,000x improvement from Ethereum 1.0’s 20TPS.

MultiversX has achieved its promise of a 1000x increase in throughput. Despite this, its team believes that as the MultiversX network grows it will continue to improve throughput—as more shards are created, allowing for more significant parallel processing.

EGLD Coin Price, Supply, and Sustainability

The MultiversX token is limited in supply, starting at 20 million EGLD. Although new tokens are minted to reward network validators, the maximum coin supply can never exceed 31,415,926 EGLD. This number is expected to decrease as more transactions are processed.

Bitcoins PoW consensus mechanism raises environmental concerns because of the large amounts of computational power and terawatts of electricity involved in validating transactions. In contrast, MultiversX ensures scalability while remaining sustainable through SPoS and adaptive state sharding.

Processing a transaction on the MultiversX network, even when operating at maximum capacity, only requires 88 mili-Wh, 624 million times more efficient than Bitcoin’s 550kWh per transaction.

Okay, but without PoW, how does one mine on the MultiversX network?

You don’t. 

Any user who submits a transaction (simple token transfers or calls to smart contracts) to the MultiversX network must pay a fee in EGLD tokens. These fees serve as rewards for validators.

Stakes serve as collateral for the ‘good behavior’ of validators: they stand to lose their stake (currently set at 2,500 EGLD) if they attempt to abuse their influence on the network. 

Suppose a validator consistently misbehaves or performs malicious actions. In that case, it will be fined accordingly and lose EGLD, an action known as stake slashing, and will also have its validator status removed. This form of punishment is reserved for severe offenses.

Validator nodes have individual rating scores that express their overall reliability and responsiveness. Rating will increase for ‘well-behaved’ nodes: every time a validator takes part in a successful consensus, its rating increases.

The opposite is also true: a validator that is offline during consensus or that fails to contribute to blocks being produced will be deemed unreliable and experience a drop in its rating. 

EGLD Trading history

According to data from Cointelegraph Markets and TradingView, since reaching a low of $115 on March 25, the price of EGLD has aggregated more than 110% to a new all-time high of $245.80 on April 12, as a range of favorable statements led to increases in its trading volume.

EGLD coin’s price has been affected by real-world adoption, like on April 7, when MultiversX broadcast that the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu aims to implement crypto payment methods for its 11,000 students, enabling those interested in paying their admission fees using EGLD.

Another significant development, namely a partnership with Shopping.io, was shared on April 10. It revealed that shoppers could earn rewards from some of the largest retailers in the United States by shopping with EGLD.

Recently, Polkamon also helped bring attention to MultiversX when it stated that it would be integrating with the MultiversX platform in Q3 to “enhance the user experience with additional speed & convenience.”

How to Buy EGLD?

Okay, so now you know all about MultiversX, you might be curious to check it out. Here are a few of the best marketplaces to buy EGLD.

Coinbase is a leading crypto exchange platform and an excellent place to start if you’re new to crypto exchange. It’s designed to be as straightforward as possible, a convenience reflected in its prices. For a more detailed description, see our Coinbase review. 

Gemini: known for its far-above-average customer support, Gemini has separated itself from exchanges that struggle to keep up with customer support needs with their fast and beginner-friendly services. Unlike most exchanges, Gemini allows you to begin trading as soon as you deposit via bank transfer. Read our Gemini review.

Binance is one of the most well-known cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. When you purchase EGLD from here, you benefit from the lower exchange fees than competing exchanges. Its increased liquidity means you can buy and sell tokens quickly to take advantage of market-moving news. Read our Binance review.

For a comprehensive list and a marketplace comparison, see our guide on the best cryptocurrency exchanges.

Where can you store your EGLD?

Here are some of the best wallets for EGLD. For more all-around wallets that support EGLD, you can look at our guide for choosing a crypto wallet in 2021.

MultiversX Web Wallet  is the official wallet of the MultiversX community. It’s simple, secure, and easy to create, and allows users to store, send, receive, and otherwise transact with EGLD tokens.

Maiar is an official EGLD digital wallet powered by the MultiversX blockchain network. Creating this wallet is super simple, as you do not need a password, private keys, or recovery passphrases. The end-to-end encrypted wallet supports EGLD, Ethereum (ETH), Binance (BNB), ERD ERC20, ERD BEP2, and plans to support BTC in the future.

Trust Wallet is Binance’s official wallet and is trusted by over 5 million users worldwide. The mobile wallet has now expanded its support to EGLD tokens, meaning all existing and new users of Trust wallet can now hold MultiversX tokens in their wallets.

Final Thoughts: MultiversX, EGLD Coin, and Scaling

With its adaptive state sharding and Secure Proof of Stake protocols, MultiversX brings an exciting approach to blockchain scalability, featuring unprecedented transaction speeds and throughput numbers.

As an ‘innovative public blockchain designed to scale,’ MultiversX seems to have achieved its goal of preserving security and speed while achieving scalability and sustainability.

Between 2018 and January 2021, MultiversX developed two prototypes and completed both a private and a public testnet. In August 2019, MultiversX released the details about its economics for network stakers and validators. 

Later that year, the team opted to trade in MultiversX’s initial VM for a WASM-based environment. The MultiversX mainnet launched in July 2020, and the Maiar application in January 2021. 

MultiversX intends to implement an on-chain governance mechanism that will allow network participants to vote on essential protocol changes and impact the protocol’s future direction at some point in Q1 2021 and release its DeFi2.0 sometime soon. 

If you’d like to, you can get in touch with the MultiversX team at contact@elrond.com and careers@elrond.com. 

The post MultiversX (Elrond) Review: How Does the EGLD Coin Work? appeared first on CoinCentral.

The following Hodlnaut review examines its interest account product, security practices, usability, and community trust. 

Hodlnaut Review: Quick Summary

Hodlnaut was a Singapore-based company founded in 2019., available worldwide, excluding locations prohibited by Hodlnaut Policy or Sanction Laws.

Hodlnaut derived its name from the crypto slang HODL (Hold On for Dear Life), which is an enthusiastic expression that refers to keeping your digital assets rather than selling them, regardless of the volatility of the market. Ironically, Hodlnaut ended up HODLing their customers’ assets against their will. 

The latter part of the company name is in the motif of “astronaut.” The platform accumulated about $250M in assets under its management from over 5,000 users, according to its site.  Hodlnaut raised about $100,000 in funding from one pre-seed funding round with Antler, a Singaporean startup accelerator and venture capitalist firm.

There is no minimum balance to qualify for crypto interest. Hodlnaut offers: 

• 6.2% APY on BTC
• 6.7% APY on ETH
• 10.5% APY on stablecoins.

Hodlnaut’s Token Swap let users exchange tokens directly in the app e.g, BTC to ETH

Deposits are free, and users can withdraw anytime– prior to the freezing of all withdrawals. 

The Hodlnaut Team

Hodlnaut was founded by CEO Juntao Zhu and CTO Simon Lee. The duo previously founded Cypher Forge, a cryptocurrency trade execution platform. 

Zhu spent over three years as an analyst and developer with the Swiss wealth management firm Credit Suisse.

Lee spent over three years in engineering management roles. The two founders hold a combined nine years of experience in software development, finance, and engineering. 

Hodlnaut Review and Interest Rates: How Does Hodlnaut Compare?

Hodlnaut supported six cryptocurrencies: BTC, ETH, DAI, USDC, USDT, and WBTC, offering between 6.2% and 10.5% APY.

How Did Hodlnaut Make Money?

Like most other crypto interest accounts claimed to do, Hodlnaut used your assets as collateral to offer loans to corporate creditors, making profit the difference between the interest it pays users and what it charges to offer loans to its institutional borrowers. 

“We have incredibly stringent capital requirements in place of our counterparties,” commented Zhu, in 2021. “In any case, we’re very selective with whom we lend to. We only lend to corporate entities with good credit scores, and we will verify this with them during the onboarding process. The loan-to-value (LTV) Ratio of our loans is usually 70% or lower.”

The team noted the platform also made money by earning interest from lending its assets to decentralized protocols.

Behind the scenes, Hodlnaut had converted $317 million of user funds (nearly everything) into UST to earn a 20% APY on Anchor Protocol, a dApp on the Terra blockchain.

Hodlnaut took a critical hit when UST, the algorithmic stablecoin began to fail in maintaining its 1:1 peg in May 2022 and lost a majority of its value. It did not disclose to its users its involvement and allowed users to continue to deposit and withdraw as usual. On July 14th, the Singapore Police Force demanded the remainder of the assets be transferred to them, which also was not communicated to its users. 

On August 8th, 2022, Hodlnaut suddenly suspended all withdrawals citing “recent market conditions,” also revealing on a blog post it owed about $281 million and only had $88 million remaining.

Hodlnaut is currently in bankruptcy proceedings.

Hodlnaut’s Platform Security

The platform required users to set up 2FA before they can make a withdrawal, which helps keep accounts secure and prevent unauthorized withdrawals. Hodlnaut used industry-standard encryption and other safety regulations to ensure that assets and information on its platform are protected. 

Hodlnaut has never been hacked, and its losses were due primarily to poor decision-making and terrible risk management by its owners. 

Hodlnaut’s primary custodian was Fireblocks, a digital asset custody solution that employs various methods to ensure the safety of assets. Fireblocks holds assets in a mix of offline cold storage and insured hot wallets; all user deposits are never in the same place at once. 

Hodlnaut gave the option of purchasing insurance on your crypto via a partnership with European company Nexus Mutual, which paid out just about $1 million out of an estimated $193 million shortfall.  The Nexus blog post specifies, “members who protected their deposit with Custody Cover from Nexus Mutual received the first-ever on-chain payouts for a custodial loss event.”

The Hodlnaut insurance with Nexus stood at $22 million.

Hodlnaut outlined its procedures in the case of a borrower default.

Hodlnaut was certified by the Singapore Fintech Association, which is recognized by the Monetary Authority of Singapore

Hodlnaut Review Final Thoughts: How Did Hodlnaut Fail?

Hodlnaut offered a competitive product in an increasingly competitive industry, but rather than generating its rates from cryptocurrency lending, as it had specified, it plunged a majority of its customers’ funds into an algorithmically traded stablecoin. When Terra collapsed, so did any of Hodlnaut’s hopes of remaining solvent. 

The collapse of UST also triggered a domino effect, wiping out billions of dollars of value from the cryptocurrency industry.

Hodlnaut’s irresponsible risk management has left hundreds of millions of its customers’ money in bankruptcy court, and it’s a small excerpt of 2022 crypto interest account disasters.

The post Hodlnaut Review: Is Hodlnaut Legit and Worth Your Time? appeared first on CoinCentral.

Celsius was a leading crypto lending and wallet service. Founded in 2017 by Alex Mashinsky, Nuke Goldstein, and S. Daniel Leon, Celsius had over 340,000 users worldwide, earning interest at up to 17.78% APY, compounded daily.

Gemini is a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian available in the US and 50+ countries worldwide. It lets users buy, sell, and store cryptocurrencies. Founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in 2015. Gemini has over 13.6M users and recently surpassed $30 billion of crypto under its custody.

Gemini Earn was Gemini’s interest account, released in February 2021. It has also paused all function. 

So, let’s dive into Celsius vs. Gemini Earn– which is the better interest account and why? 

Celsius vs. Gemini Earn: Key Information

Feature #1: Interest Rates

Celsius offered varying APY rates for users in the US, international users, and users who choose to receive their interest in its native token, CEL.

Celsius offered interest on stablecoins like PAX, GUSD, and USDC at up to 8.88%. This APY can go up to 11.21% if paid in CEL, which is only available for international users. 

In contrast, Gemini Earn offered a fixed rate of 2.05 APY for BTC and ETH and up to 7.40% APY for stablecoins like DAI and GUSD, Gemini’s stablecoin. Gemini Earn supports the 40+ coins available in the Gemini exchange. 

How Do Celsius and Gemini Make Money?

Like most centralized banks, Celsius and Gemini make money by loaning customers’ assets to corporate and retail borrowers. The significant difference here is that your resources are digital, so there are some nuances to consider.

Celsius lends to corporate institutions and exchanges, securing these loans by requiring at least 50% LTV (loan-to-value) collateral. In other words, to get a loan creditors must have crypto assets at least 2x the value of the amount they intend to borrow held with Celsius as collateral. This collateral can go up to 150% LTV.

It’s important to note the risk associated with this. Crypto loans and deposits can not be FDIC insured. Moreover, you may be permitting Celsius to make uncollateralized loans.

“…you grant Celsius…the right to…lend…any amount of such Digital assets…without retaining in Celsius’ possession and/or control a like amount of Digital Assets….”

Here’s what Celsius said about its methods for securing loans.

They are very clear on the risks of Gemini’s Terms.

According to Founder Alex Machinsky, Celsius intends to provide self-insurance on loaned assets soon, although it has not announced a release date for this.

https://twitter.com/Mashinsky/status/1357792208930365440?s=19

All user funds are frozen on both platforms as of January 2023.

Feature #2: Security

Celsius’ custodians are Fireblocks and PrimeTrust. They insure funds they hold, but this insurance does not cover your assets when they’re “deployed,” or loaned to generate yield. Celsius’ in-app security includes 2FA and “HODL Mode,” a feature that restricts withdrawals.

On the 15th of April 2021, Celsius announced a security hack that had gained access to a third-party email distribution system and the contact info of some of its customers. They then performed a phishing attack through email and SMS on some Celsius users.

On the other hand, Gemini is renowned for its security practices. The Gemini Trust Company, Gemini’s custodian, has over $30 billion worth of crypto in its custody. It secures users’ assets in offline cold storage and insured hot wallets for as long as those assets remain in its possession. Gemini Trust also secures the funds of other platforms, including the popular crypto interest platform, BlockFi. Again, assets are not insured by Gemini once they are deployed.

Gemini is a New York Trust company and is subject to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). It has completed SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 exams and earned an ISO 27001 certification. As of this writing, Gemini has never been hacked.

The Court of Public Opinion: Celsius vs. Gemini Reddit

The cryptocurrency industry sentiment att large (as of January 2023) views Celsius very poorly, with groups such has the “Retail Clawback Protection” Telegram group to protest and advocatefor their rights for their frozen assets. 

Similarly, Gemini’s freezing of user assets has undermined the community’s trust in its platform.

Final Toughts: Can You Trust Celsius and Gemini? 

No.

Celsius had over 340,000 users and over 100,000 BTC in assets. 

Gemini had once earned its trustworthy status with industry-leading security practices, certifications, and longevity. It had about 13.6M users and maintains a comprehensive knowledge base that contains FAQs, definitions, videos, and more. 

However, both companies entered complex legal and financial engagements that collapsed in 2022, forcing them to freeze all of their users’ assets.

The post Celsius vs. Gemini Earn: What’s the Better Interest Account? appeared first on CoinCentral.

The following Celsius vs. Nexo review examines the nuances of each platform, standout features, interest offerings, security, and community trust.

Founded in 2017, Celsius is a London-based company with $20.6B+ in assets under management from 1M+ users. Celsius users in the US can earn 6.20% APY on up to 1 BTC and 3.51% on deposits above that. The company offers 5.35% APY on up to 100 ETH, then 5.05%. Celsius users can also earn 3% on LINK, 4.08% on LTC, 8.88% on GUSD and USDC, and 5.50% on PAXG.

Celsius users outside the US can earn APY more across the board if they choose to receive their interest earnings in Celsius’ native token, CEL. 

Nexo is also based in London and was founded in 2017. It has over $15 billion in AUM from 2M+ users, who earn 6% APY on BTC, ETH, LINK, and LTC. The company also offers 10% on DAI and USDC and 6% on PAXG.

Nexo users can earn 2% more in APY across the board if they choose to receive interest in Nexo’s native token, NEXO. 

Both Celsius and Nexo are accessible via web and mobile apps.

So, both platforms have strikingly similar value propositions, but there are some distinctions worth considering.

Celsius vs. Nexo?– which one is right for you? Let’s dig in.

Celsius vs. Nexo Key Information

Feature #1: Interest Rates — Who Has Better APY, Celsius or Nexo?

Bitcoin

Celsius offers tiered rates on BTC. Users can earn:

• 6.20% on 0 – 1 BTC
• 3.51% on >1 BTC

Nexo’s Bitcoin rates are a flat 6% APY for users in the US, and 8% for international users who receive their interest in NEXO.

Ethereum

Celsius offers:

• 5.35% on 0 – 100 ETH
• 3.05% on 100+ ETH

Nexo’s APY rates are 6% for US users, and 8% for international users earning in Nexo. 

Stablecoins

Celsius offers 8.8% APY on TUSD, GUSD, PAX, USDC, USDT ERC20, TGBP, TAUD, THKD, TCAD, BUSD, ZUSD, and 4.60% on MCDAI.

On the flip side, Nexo offers 10% APY on USDT, DAI, USDC, TUSD, GBPX, HUSD, and USDX, and 6% on PAXG.

Here are Celsius rates on cryptocurrencies;

Celsius offers interest on a wide variety of digital assets, including DeFi tokens Aave and Compound. 

Here are Nexo’s rates when users choose to earn their interest in the currency deposited, or “In-Kind.”

Here are its rates when users earn in NEXO.

Winner: Nexo offers higher rates on Bitcoin, Ether, altcoins, and stablecoins across the board, earning it the win in this category. It is worth noting that Celsius does have a wider range of supported assets.

How Do Celsius and Nexo Make Money?

Celsius makes money by providing loans to corporate institutions and exchanges. The company redistributes revenue to its users via rewards depending on their loyalty tier (or the amount of CEL they hold) and has paid upwards of $508M in rewards to its users in the past year.

To secure these loans, Celsius requires users to hold collateral of at least 50% LTV (loan-to-value). In other words, to get a loan, borrowers must hold crypto assets at least twice the value of the sum they’d like to borrow within a Celsius account. This collateral can go up to 150% LTV. 

Like Celsius, Nexo makes money from the difference between what it pays the users it borrows from (or offers interest to) and what it charges borrowers. The platform makes loans to both its consumers and institutional borrowers. 

Nexo shares 30% of profits to NEXO holders as dividends. Since 2017, Nexo has paid out over $29.8M as dividends to its token holders.

Consumers can borrow from Nexo using credit lines accessible through a fiat transfer or the Nexo card. These loans are collateralized at a minimum of 50% LTV.

Feature #2: Payouts and Withdrawals

Celsius lets users withdraw their funds at any time without fees. However, it has a soft cap on withdrawals of $50,000+ within 24 hours, and larger withdrawals can take up to 48 hours to process. Celsius interest is compounded each Monday.

On Nexo, interest is compounded daily, and users can make 1-5 free withdrawals depending on their loyalty tier or the amount of NEXO they hold. Nexo users can also make unlimited free fiat deposits, transfers, and withdrawals.

Winner: Celsius. Users can make unlimited withdrawals and not pay any withdrawal, transfer, transaction, or early termination fees. 

Feature #3: Security

Celsius and Nexo are both custodial platforms, meaning they take possession of their users’ private keys. Crypto loans and deposits cannot be FDIC insured, and one should adequately research the risks of using crypto interest products.

However, both companies have demonstrated a high degree of security when it comes to ensuring deposits are never within reach of prying hacker hands. 

Platform Safety

Celsius has a slew of user-facing security features, such as 2-factor authentication, a pin, biometric security, and some confirmation features like email verification when changing your wallet address and manual verification when attempting to withdraw assets worth over $150,000.

Celsius also has an inbuilt security feature called HODL mode. In HODL mode, users must complete a 24-hour waiting period before their withdrawals are confirmed, so there’s more time for you (and Celsius) to respond if your account has been hacked.

Nexo’s platform employs security procedures including 2FA, a password, biometric security, and email confirmation features.

Fund Safety 

Celsius keeps user assets in third-party custodians Fireblocks and PrimeTrust. 

Cryptocurrency assets on platforms like Celsius are often on the move to be loaned and received to generate interest; the above insurance doesn’t cover your assets when they’re loaned to Celsius creditors to generate yield.

In April 2021, Celsius’ email distribution servers were hacked, and the contact info of some performed an email and SMS phishing attack that resulted in the loss of some users’ funds.

In a blog post, CEO Alex Mashinsky stated, “ We have always communicated to our customers and will continue to reinforce that Celsius will never ask for passwords, private keys, seed phrases, and other confidential user credentials.”

On the flip side, Nexo keeps user assets safe in cold wallets secured with multi-signatures, with private keys stored offline in Class III bank vaults for physical protection. This substantial protection is possible through several custodians. Here’s a breakdown;

Again, Nexo’s user assets are insured by its custodians. This insurance comes up to around $375 million, which is only about 3% of Nexo’s total AUM. 

As of this writing, Nexo has never been hacked. 

Winner: Celsius gives its users many options to keep their accounts safe. Its extensive user-side protection against hacks gives it the win in this section, though Nexo’s ample protection against custodial hacks is worth noting.

Feature #4: Promos and Bonuses

CoinCentral readers can earn up to $50 in BTC by signing up for a Celsius account and making a deposit of up to $100,000. The company also offers up to $50 on each successful referral.

CoinCentral readers can get $10 when depositing $100 or more on Nexo for the first time.

Feature #5: Ease of Use

Both Celsius and Nexo are beginner-friendly and accessible via web, iOS, and Android apps.

Celsius vs. Nexo: Standout Features

Celsius’ main standout features include its token CEL. Users who choose to earn interest with CEL can qualify for up to 25% discounts on loan interest payments.

Celsius’ HODL Mode is also pretty neat. By letting users disable any outgoing activity on their account, Celsius helps people who don’t make frequent withdrawals double their protection. Celsius’ CelPay, is a handy inbuilt crypto payment feature that lets users make purchases by transferring crypto from their accounts.

Nexo’s standout features include its exchange, which lets users swap seamlessly between 100+ crypto and fiat pairs. Its card is accepted by over 40M merchants worldwide and lets users receive instant 2% cashback with no monthly or annual fees.

Holders of the Nexo token also earn some valuable perks, like higher APY rates and reduced rates on crypto loans.

Customer Service

Celsius has a dedicated Help Center containing FAQs on deposits, withdrawals, and security. Users can also submit a help request and receive support via email.

Nexo also maintains detailed FAQs in its Help Center, and users can access 24/7 support.

The Court of Public Opinion: Celsius vs. Nexo Reddit 

Support for both Nexo and Celsius is immediately apparent on Reddit. Users favor both companies for their interest rates, but support leans towards Celsius for its perceived transparency and openness. Generally, most Redditors advise that users diversify by using both platforms. 

Celsius vs. Nexo Final Thoughts: Which is the Best Crypto Interest Account?

It’s a very close race between Celsius and Nexo for the best cryptocurrency interest account.

Celsius lets users earn on 40+ cryptocurrencies, with up to 6.20% APY on Bitcoin, up to 5.35% APY on Ether, and 8.8% APY on most stablecoins, including USDC, USDT, and GUSD. 

On the flip side, Nexo users can earn 6% on Bitcoin and Ether and 10% APY on stablecoins like USDT, BUSD, USDC, and more.

Celsius takes several user-side precautions such as HODL mode. 

Nexo’s expansive fund safety measures mean that assets kept in its custody seem relatively secure from hacks.

Nexo’s 24/7 customer support and higher rates on cryptocurrencies (particularly through its loyalty program) may attract potential users. 

However, Celsius wins in this review with a broader amount of supported assets, and well-thought-out user-side protection features.

CoinCentral readers can get up to $50 in BTC when they sign up for a Celsius account, and get $50 by referring a friend to the platform.

CoinCentral readers can get $10 when depositing $100 or more on Nexo for the first time.

For a deeper dive, we suggest reading our individual Celsius review and Nexo reviews.

The post Celsius vs. Nexo: Comparing Two Top Crypto Interest Accounts appeared first on CoinCentral.

Hodlnaut is a crypto interest provider operating out of Singapore. Launched in 2019, the company supports six assets and is backed by a single investor, with only about $100k in funding. Hodlnaut has over $500 million in assets under management and over 10,000 users. 

Nexo is a London-based cryptocurrency platform that launched in 2017. The company features a suite of products in addition to its interest account: a cryptocurrency exchange, crypto-backed loan service, card, and token. Nexo offers U.S. users 10% APY for stablecoins and 6% APY for BTC and ETH.  International Nexo (outside the U.S.) can choose to earn their rewards in the company’s native token, NEXO, for a two-percent interest increase across the board.

Nexo has $52.5 million in funding, over two million users, and $15 billion in assets under management (AUM). The company offers interest on both crypto and fiat, supporting over 23 coins and 40+ fiat currencies (the fiat feature is only available for international users.) 

Hodlnaut gives its users up to 12.73% APY on stablecoins, and up to 7.46% APY on Bitcoin and Ether. 

So, which is the better crypto interest account for you? Let’s explore.

Hodlnaut vs. Nexo Key Information 

Feature #1: Interest Rates — Who Has Higher Interest, Hodlnaut or Nexo?

Bitcoin

Hodlnaut offers tiered rates on Bitcoin:

• 7.46% on <2 BTC
• 4.08% on <8 BTC
• 2.02% on <90 BTC
• 1% on 100+ BTC

Nexo offers a flat rate of 6% APY for BTC deposits and 8% APY for users earning in NEXO. The “Earn in NEXO” option is not available for users in the U.S.

Ethereum

On Hodlnaut users earn:

• 7.46% on <20 ETH
• 4.08% on <80 ETH
• 2.02% on 100+ ETH

On Nexo, users earn a 6% APY on ETH, which goes up to 8% for users earning in NEXO.

Stablecoins

Hodlnaut offers up to 12.73% APY on USDT, USDC, and up to 8.32% on DAI

Hodlnaut’s rates on USDT:

• 12.73% on 0 – 25,000 USDT
• 7.25% on 25,000 – 100,000 USDT
• 4.60% on 100,000 – 500,000 USDT
• 3.04% on 500,000+ USDT

Hodlnaut’s rates on USDC:

• 12.73% on 0 – 25,000 USDC
• 7.25% on 25,000 – 100,000 USDC 
• 3.56% on 100,000 – 500,000 USDC
• 2.84% on 500,000+ USDC

Hodlnaut’s rates on DAI:

• 8.32% on 0 – 25,000 USDC
• 5.12% on 25,000 – 100,000 USDC 
• 3.56% on 100,000 – 500,000 USDC
• 2.02% on 500,000+ USDC

Nexo offers 10% APY on USDT, USDC, USDP, TUSD, DAI, and more. This rate increases to 12% when users choose to earn their interest in NEXO.

Winner: Though its range of assets is limited, Hodlnaut beats Nexo’s rates on all supported stablecoins except DAI, as well as its base rates on BTC and ETH. If you’re keen on earning in Nexo’s token to get higher rates, Nexo may be a better option for you and can offer higher interest, as well as more altcoin options. 

CoinCentral readers can earn up to $20 when signing up for a Hodlnaut and depositing up to $1000.

CoinCentral readers can get $10 by signing up and depositing $100 or more on Nexo.

How Do Hodlnaut and Nexo Make Money?

Most crypto interest accounts make money on the difference between what they pay depositors and what they charge borrowers, and Hodlnaut and Nexo are no different– both platforms lend to corporate borrowers, consumers, or decentralized protocols.

Cryptocurrency assets held in Hodlnaut, Nexo, or any other cryptocurrency account are not FDIC insured. Your funds in Hodlnaut and Nexo are never entirely risk-free. 

Furthermore, loaned crypto assets are not held in one place but are actively deployed to be used by borrowers and earn returns. Because of this, they’re a bit tricky to insure. 

However, Hodlnaut gives users the option of purchasing optional insurance coverage on such assets through a partnership with Nexus Mutual, an insurance option that leverages blockchain technology.

Hodlnaut and Nexo require borrowers to post collateral to combat the risk of defaults; users must hold assets at least twice the value of their loan amount to qualify for a loan, which is called a 50% loan-to-value (LTV) ratio.

Nexo shares 30% of its profits to NEXO holders as dividends. The company has paid over $29.8M to its token holders since 2017.

Feature #2: Payouts and Withdrawals

Hodlnaut users can withdraw at any time but have a daily withdrawal limit of 100 BTC if they’ve completed KYC. Larger withdrawals can take up to 48-hours and the company charges withdrawal fees on specific assets, as follows:

On Nexo, interest is compounded every 24-hours. Users can make up to five free withdrawals depending on their loyalty tier. Nexo users can also make anywhere from one to an unlimited number of free fiat transfers, deposits, and withdrawals.

Nexo’s withdrawal limits are as follows:

Winner: Hodlnaut lets users withdraw at any time as long as they don’t withdraw over 100 BTC or its equivalent in a single day.

Feature #3: Hodlnaut vs. Nexo Security

Hodlnaut’s primary custodian is Fireblocks. When users deposit with Hodlnaut, they are received through Fireblocks’ secure wallet infrastructure. Hodlnaut will then either transfer the cryptocurrencies to our self-custodied cold wallets or lend them to borrowers.

Hodlnaut’s on-platform security strategies include password hashing, two-factor authentication, and more.

Nexo’s platform employs security procedures including 2FA, a password, biometric security, and email confirmation features. The company keeps user assets safe in cold wallets secured with multi-signatures, storing private keys offline in Class III bank vaults for physical protection. This substantial defense is possible through several custodians, which they outline in their documents:

Nexo’s user assets are insured by its custodians (around $375 million, roughly 3% of its AUM) but this insurance does not protect assets after they’ve been loaned and leave their custody. Hodlnaut offers its users the option to purchase insurance that covers their deployed assets through its partnership with Nexus Mutual. 

As of this writing, both Hodlnaut and Nexo have never been hacked.  

Winner: Though Hodlnaut’s robust on-platform security is worth noting, Nexo wins.

Feature #4: Ease of Use

Nexo and Hodlnaut are both beginner-friendly platforms. 

Nexo is accessible via web, Android, and iOS apps. Be sure to go to Nexo.io, as the Nexo dot com domain isn’t related to the cryptocurrency company. 

While Hodlnaut can be accessed via web and iOS only, the company plans to launch an Android app in late October 2021.

Bonuses/Standout Features

Nexo’s Crypto Earn feature is only one out of its many offerings. The company is more widely known for its crypto exchange and token. The Nexo card is accepted by over 40 million merchants worldwide, gives users 2% cash-back on every transaction, and allows users to access crypto-backed credit lines. Furthermore, Nexo offers up to 12% APY on fiat currencies like USD, GBP, and many others.

Hodlnaut offers industry-leading interest rates, trumping those of bigger crypto interest names like BlockFi and Celsius. The platform has a crypto exchange feature called TokenSwap, which lets users switch directly between two cryptocurrencies. TokenSwap lets users wrap and unwrap their Bitcoin, change ETH to BTC or BTC to USDC, and more.

Furthermore, Hodlnaut’s preferred interest feature allows users to earn in the currency of their choice. For example, a user who deposits BTC can choose to earn their interest in USDC, USDT, or another supported currency.

Winner: Nexo. With an exchange, token, cashback card, and more, a Nexo account connects users to a suite of valuable features.

Customer Service

Hodlnaut’s FAQ page covers most of the information a user would need help with, and customers can contact the company’s 24/7 help center for more personalized support. 

Nexo’s customer service is also accessible around the clock, and also provides a comprehensive FAQ section on its site.

The Court of Public Opinion: Hodlnaut vs. Nexo Reddit 

Reddit support for both Hodlnaut and Nexo is generally stable across the board. Some users show support for Hodlnaut because their interest rates are higher and more flexible, while others prefer it for its prompt and professional support. 

Other users are more drawn to Nexo because they offer higher BTC rates, have comprehensive security practices, and have formidable financial backing.

Hodlnaut vs. Nexo Review Final Thoughts: Which is The Better Crypto Interest Account?

Hodlnaut and Nexo lead the industry with some of the highest interest rates on the market, posing stiff competition to larger crypto interest products like BlockFi and Celsius.

In terms of security and fund safety, both platforms employ industry-leading technologies and make the safety of their users’ funds, data, and private information a top priority.

Hodlnaut and Nexo are quite evenly matched on several fronts, but reasonably different in a few important distinctions. 

Nexo has been around for longer and with upwards of $52 million worth of investor backing. When compared to Hodlnaut’s humbler $100K, the company has a stronger foundation for further improving its large number of offerings. 

Nevertheless, Hodlnaut is an undeniable industry competitor with a growing base of loyal customers.

Hodlnaut beats Nexo’s base interest offerings. Where Nexo offers 6% on BTC and ETH, Hodlnaut offers 7.46% on the same. Hodlnaut’s rates reduce as the amount of BTC and ETH increases, while Nexo’s rates remain the same and increase if users earn in Nexo.

If they’re open to risk the volatility of holding the NEXO token, Nexo users can access premium interest rates on 20+ cryptocurrencies. The company’s mix-and-match custodian strategy means that it has industry-leading fund security. Its insurance covers only about 3% of its AUM and doesn’t cover deployer assets, whereas Hodlnaut offers insurance options on deployed assets.

Hodlnaut is a well-rounded crypto interest product. With strong security, high-interest rates, and industry-leading customer service and support, it’s likely that as the company grows its product will have increasing influence on the crypto interest market.

CoinCentral readers can get up to $20 in bonuses when they sign up and deposit $1000 into a Hodlnaut account in a single transaction.

However, with more comprehensive fund security, a wider range of supported assets, more flexible interest, larger investor backing, and a stronger brand and customer base, Nexo wins in this review. 

CoinCentral readers can get $10 when depositing $100 or more on Nexo for the first time.

We recommend reading our individual Hodlnaut Review and Nexo Review to learn more about these products.

The post Hodlnaut vs. Nexo: Complete Crypto Interest Account Comparison appeared first on CoinCentral.

BlockFi and Hodlnaut are both quite appealing cryptocurrency interest accounts; they offer products that allow token holders to earn passive interest on their crypto assets. 

The following BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut review will cover the differences between the APY differences, platform safety, usability, customer service, and unique features of both platforms.

Enter BlockFi, a New Jersey-based company founded in 2017 that has rapidly grown to market leader. With over $15 billion assets under management, BlockFi offers users up to 7.40% APY on DAI and GUSD and up to 4% APY on BTC and ETH. BlockFi has over 265,000 users.

After a Series D in March 2021, the company is valued at $3 billion, having raised over $508.7M from over 45 investors. 

In contrast, Hodlnaut is a bit newer to the crypto interest block. The Singapore-based company was founded in 2019 and raised about $100,000 in funding from a single pre-seed funding round (it raised the funds from Antler, a venture capital and early-stage accelerator firm. Hodlnaut has over $500M in AUM from about 5,000 users. 

Hodlnaut users can earn up to 7.46% APY on BTC and ETH, up to 8.32% on DAI, and up to 12.73% APY on USDT and USDC. It supports six cryptocurrencies and has indicated it plans to add support for more in the future. 

So, BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut? Let’s explore.

BlockFi vs. Holdnaut: Key Information

Feature #1: Interest Rates — Who Has Better APY, BlockFi or Hodlnaut?

Bitcoin

Both BlockFi and Hodlnaut offer tiered rates on BTC. On BlockFi, users can earn:

• 4% on <0.25 BTC
• 1.5% on <5 BTC
• 0.25% on >5 BTC

Holdnaut offers significantly more competitive rates:

• 7.46% on <2 BTC
• 4.08% on <8 BTC
• 2.02% on <90 BTC
• 1% on 100+ BTC

Ethereum

BlockFi offers:

• 4% on 0 – 5 ETH
• 1.5% on 5 – 50 ETH
• 0.25% on >50 ETH

 Again, Hodlnaut’s APY offerings are significantly better. Users earn:

• 7.46% on <20 BTC
• 4.08% on <80 BTC
• 2.02% on 100+ BTC

Stablecoins

BlockFi users can earn on six stablecoins: GUSD, DAI, USDT, BUSD, and USDC at up to 7.5% APY, and PAXG at up to 2% APY.

On Hodlnaut, users can earn up to 12.73% APY on USDC and USDT and up to 8.32% APY on DAI.

Holdnaut users can also earn up to 7.43% on WBTC, while BlockFi users can earn on LTC, LINK, UNI, and BAT.

Overall, Hodlnaut delivers higher rates across the board, although BlockFI supports more tokens. If you were looking to earn on your LTC, for example, you’d be better served taking a look at BlockFi. It’s also important to note that these interest rates may fluctuate due to the nature of cryptocurrencies.

Winner: Hodlnaut. With solid rates across the board, Hodlnaut offers higher APY at higher margins to its users. However, BlockFi offers a wider range of supported assets, although its offerings are still less than those of Celsius and Gemini.

How Do BlockFi and Hodlnaut Make Money?

BlockFi makes money by offering institutional and consumer loans, while Hodlnaut makes loans to corporate entities. This works by taking loans from users (the interest rates they offer) and then using user assets as collateral to provide borrowers with loans at higher interest. 

BlockFi and Hodlnaut earn from the difference between the interest they pay users and the interest they ask from their borrowers.

It’s helpful to note that as crypto can not be FDIC insured, crypto interest accounts have a unique set of risks. Earning interest on crypto is not the same as holding fiat in a savings account. 

Most crypto interest accounts require creditors to stake collateral to combat the risk of borrower defaults. BlockFi is one such platform, requiring 50% loan-to-value on all crypto-backed loans. While managing over $15 billion in crypto, BlockFi has 0% losses across its lending portfolio and is regarded for safer lending practices.

In an interview with CoinCentral, Hodlnaut CEO, Juntao Zhu commented the following about the company’s lending habits: 

Furthermore, the company details its process in the event that a borrower defaults:

Winner: BlockFi. While it makes money the same as Hodlnaut (although the company does not loan to consumers) it also requires loans to be collateralized at a minimum of 50% LTV and has a history of practicing safe lending methods.

Feature #2: Payouts and Withdrawals

BlockFi users receive interest payouts each month, with one free stablecoin withdrawal and one free cryptocurrency withdrawal monthly. This withdrawal can only be applied to one coin, and further withdrawals attract a withdrawal fee. BlockFi has withdrawal caps for each cryptocurrency. Here’s what that looks like:

Hodlnaut users can withdraw their crypto earnings (for a fee) at any time, with a daily cap of 100 BTC for accounts that have been verified through completing KYC requirements. Once you’ve funded your account, you’ll begin earning interest immediately. This interest is paid each Monday.

Winner: BlockFi’s free stablecoin and fixed coin withdrawals, as well as their lower fees for withdrawing BTC, are all positives. However, with unlimited withdrawals, no caps, and much lower withdrawal rates on ETH, Hodlnaut wins over BlockFi in this category. 

Feature #3: BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut Security

Your assets held in BlockFi are only as safe as BlockFi’s primary custodian, Gemini Trust. Gemini secures 95% of BlockFi’s AUM in cold storage wallets insured by Aon and 5% in insured hot wallets. Furthermore, US dollars in Gemini Trust are FDIC-insured up to $250,000 per individual. 

What happens during a hack? BlockFi announced a security breach on its platform in May 2020. Clients lost no funds, and the hacker was able to gain access to an employee’s phone and credentials, bypassing their two-factor authentication through a sim-swapping attack. 

In an exclusive interview with CoinCentral, a BlockFi representative said the following about its methods in the event of a security breach:

Holdnaut uses industry-standard encryption and requires users to set up 2FA before making withdrawals. Hodlnaut’s primary custodian is Fireblocks, which holds assets in a mix of offline cold storage and insured hot wallets, claiming that the entirety of a given user’s deposit is never in the same place at once.

Uniquely, Hodlnaut also gives users the option to purchase insurance on their crypto through a partnership with Nexus Mutual. This is notable as most platforms in the cryptocurrency interest space don’t offer insurance options for user assets after being deployed (loaned.) 

Since these interest platforms are constantly lending and receiving deposits, funds are in constant motion, making them tricky to insure. Hodlnaut’s insurance with Nexus currently caps at $22M and is anticipated to grow as the companies gain traction.

Hodlnaut is certified by the Singapore Fintech Association, which the Monetary Authority of Singapore recognizes. As of this writing, Hodlnaut is undergoing a license application to become the first regulated entity in Singapore’s crypto borrowing and lending space. 

Winner: BlockFi. A U.S. based company with extensive security protocols both on its platforms and courtesy of its custodian, BlockFi has made many moves to securing its platform. However, its worth noting that Hodlnaut’s optional Nexus Mutual insurance coverage can provide an extra level of safety to Hodlnaut users interested in it.

Feature #4: BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut Ease of Use

BlockFi is accessible via web and a mobile app that is available on Android and iOS. 

Holdnaut is currently available via web and an iOS app released in mid-2021.

Winner: BlockFi. The platform is accessible via Android and iOS apps for users who prefer to manage their stack on the go, and a web app for users who prefer a broad look at all their assets.  Although Hodlnat’s iOS app has been launched, Android users can only access the platform via its web app.

BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut: Bonuses/Standout Features

BlockFi also offers a trading account and a crypto credit card that users can use to earn an unlimited 1.5% cashback on each transaction, 3.5% back in BTC within a users’ first three months, and more rewards.

Hodlnaut’s Token Swap lets users exchange currencies directly in the app. The platform supports WBTC, so users can use the token swap feature to wrap and unwrap their BTC. 

CoinCentral readers can earn up to $250 by signing up for and depositing up to $100,000+ into a BlockFi account, and up to $20 when they signup to Hodlnaut and deposit up to $100. When you refer a friend, they’ll receive a $20 signup bonus after making a deposit equal to $1000.

Hodlnaut users can also earn up to $300 if their referrals sign up using Hodlnaut’s iOS app, and earn 10% commission on their referrals’ interest. Hodlnaut bonus payouts are in the same asset deposited.

The Court of Public Opinion: BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut Reddit / Customer Support

BlockFi has an above-average customer support and is favored in many Reddit reviews for its safety procedures, stablecoin rates, and 50% LTV policy. BlockFi customer service can be reached at support@blockfi.com. 

Reddit reviews of Hodlnaut customer support are generally positive, and comments on its APY offerings are supportive across the board. You can contact Hodlnaut support via a support ticket or at support@hodlnaut.com.

Both companies maintain FAQ pages. 

BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut: Which is the Better Crypto Interest Account? 

BlockFi has been around the crypto interest block. With a larger audience, an over $3bn valuation, and 15bn AUM, it certainly seems to be ahead of Hodlnaut regarding customer trust and company profile.

BlockFi offers a broader range of supported assets than Hodlnaut, which is still less than the 40+ assets supported by competitors like Celsius and Gemini.

Despite this, Hodlnaut wins in the cryptocurrency interest offering department, with up to  7.46% APY on BTC and ETH, instead of BlockFi’s 4%. Hodlnaut also wins with stablecoins, offering up to 12.73% APY on USDC, USDT, and BUSD.

Hodlnaut also has higher rates on DAI (up to 8.32%) as opposed to BlockFi’s up to 7.5%, but doesn’t support GUSD, for which BlockFi offers 7.5% APY. 

Hodlnaut boasts an impressive value proposition for its size: its customer service is impressively quick, and its insurance option is a direct attempt to mitigate some of the risks that come with cryptocurrency interest accounts. 

CoinCentral readers can earn up to $250 when signing up for BlockFi, and up to $20 when signing up for Hodlnaut.

BlockFi takes the lead in the BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut comparison for a few reasons:

1. BlockFi is a U.S.-based company and is forced to work within the confines of U.S. regulations, whereas Hodlnaut is based in Singapore and must work within the confines of its respective government. This is a matter of preference, but if you’re one of our readers located in the United States, BlockFi may be a better choice. 
2. BlockFi has raised more venture capital money to invest in a better product experience.

However, BlockFi must continue to innovate its product to keep pace with a rapidly evolving crypto interest account ecosystem. 

As Hodlnaut grows, we will likely see the product develop to support more assets and improve features.  However, Hodlnaut has much less funding and, with over $500M in AUM, will inevitably have to demonstrate more explicit certifications to be responsible with user funds. 

For a more detailed dive, we suggest reading our BlockFi Review and Hodlnaut Review.

The post BlockFi vs. Hodlnaut: Which Account is Best to Earn Crypto APY? appeared first on CoinCentral.

BlockFi was founded in 2017 and is a New Jersey-based company as a crypto lender and interest-earning platform. The company is currently valued at $3 billion and has raised over $508.7k from its 40+ investors, including Pomp Investments. 

BlockFi manages over 15 billion worth of assets for its over 230,000 users.

Nexo was founded in 2017 and is based in London. It has a cocktail of offerings, including an exchange, crypto loans, an interest account, and its native NEXO token. 

The European company brings an intriguing twist to the crypto interest game, offering competitive APY rates for both crypto tokens and fiat currencies like USD and GBP. Nexo has over 2M users and over $30m worth of assets under its management.

Both BlockFi and Nexo are impressive companies in their own rights, but who brings the most to the crypto interest table? 

If you’re split between using BlockFi or Nexo or considering using both, look no further. 

The following BlockFi vs. Nexo review will outline key features, various interest rate comparisons, security, and sign-up bonuses. 

BlockFi vs. Nexo: Key Information

Feature #1: Interest Rates – Who Has Better APY, BlockFi or Nexo?

Bitcoin: 

BlockFi offers tiered annual interest rates depending on the amount of BTC you hold in your account:

• 4% on <0.25 
• 1.5% on <5 BTC
• 0.25% on >5 BTC

Nexo offers a fixed 6% APY on all BTC deposits.

Ethereum: 

BlockFi lets you earn 4% APY on up to 5 ETH, 1.5% between 5 and 50 ETH, and 0.25% above that.

Nexo offers its users 6% APY on ETH deposits.

Stablecoins: 

BlockFi’s tiered offerings give users 7.5% APY on stablecoin deposits (USDT, USDC, GUSD, PAX, BUSD) between 0 and 50,000, then 5%. The company offers 8.5% APY on Dai deposits between 0 and 50,000, then 6%. 

Nexo offers 10% APY on dollar-backed stablecoins (USDT, USDC, DAI, TUSD, HUSD) and 6% on PAXG.

BlockFi’s highest rates go to DAI holders, while Nexo offers 12% APY to holders of its NEXO token.

Nexo users who opt to receive their interest earnings in NEXO get a 2% interest increase on all currencies.

Unlike most other accounts, Nexo also allows its users to earn interest on fiat. Users can make 10% APY on EUR, GBP, and USD. These rates also go up to 12% if you choose to receive your fiat earnings in NEXO rather than the currency you deposit. However, “Earn in NEXO” is not available in the US.

How Do BlockFi and Nexo Make Money?

BlockFi

BlockFi borrows assets at a particular rate (the interest it offers users) and makes money by lending those assets to retail and institutional borrowers through cryptocurrency loans. Borrowers get liquidity without having to sell their cryptocurrency assets. 

BlockFi is known for more cautious lending strategies and performs credit assessments of its borrowers. For safety, BlockFi stores its crypto reserves (which it uses to fund users’ withdrawals) with Gemini Trust, its primary custodian. 

BlockFi also offers collateralized loans to individual consumers, and it funds these loans using stablecoin deposits (~7.5% – 5% APY). These consumers must have holdings at least 2x the value of the amount they wish to borrow. 

For example, if you want to take out a $5,000 loan on BlockFi, you’d have to keep at least $10,000 of crypto in your account. If during the period of your loan, the total value of your crypto holdings in your account drops below $10,000 and you don’t deposit more, BlockFi will immediately liquidate your holdings to pay back the loan. That’s called a “margin call.”

To avoid margin calls, it’s best to maintain an LTV higher than 50%. The LTV percentage you should have will depend on the volatility of the currency you hold. 

BlockFi pays interest based on the yield that it generates from lending. The company funds its consumer loans (usually charging ~10 – 13% APR) using stablecoin deposits, which means it can pay higher interest rates to users who deposit GUSD and other stablecoins.

Nexo

Like BlockFi, Nexo makes money from the difference between the interest it pays the users it borrows from and what it charges borrowers. 

The platform makes loans to both its consumers and institutional borrowers.

Feature #2: Payouts and Withdrawals

Your assets in BlockFi will begin accruing interest the day after you make your deposit. Interest is compounded monthly.

On Nexo, interest is compounded daily.

BlockFi gives users one free crypto withdrawal and one free stablecoin withdrawal each month. Users can only use this free withdrawal on one currency, and BlockFi charges fees (below) with specific withdrawal limits per coin.

In contrast, Nexo offers 1 to 5 free withdrawals to its users depending on their loyalty tier (or the amount of NEXO they hold on the platform. 

Nexo users can make unlimited fiat deposits, transfers, and withdrawals at no charge.

Feature #3: BlockFi vs. Nexo Security

BlockFi secures users’ funds with Gemini Trust, which is known for its industry-leading crypto security practices. 

Gemini has over $30 billion worth of crypto in its custody and is a New York Trust company subject to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). The company has completed SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 exams and has an ISO 27001 certification. 

Gemini holds BlockFi assets in offline cold storage and insured hot wallets for security but doesn’t insure those assets once they’re deployed. 

As of this writing, BlockFi was hacked for user account information, but users lost no funds. The breach was announced on May 14th in an email to BlockFi users; the malicious actor gained access to clients’ contact info (email, SMS) via a sim-swapping attack.

Nexo makes use of a couple of custodians, including BitGo, Ledger, and Fireblocks, to keep funds safe. 

The platform is insured up to $375M, about 3% of its total assets under management. Here’s a breakdown:

Feature #4: Ease of Use

Both platforms are beginner-friendly and accessible via a web app, as well as Android/IOS apps. 

Feature #5: Standout Features

BlockFi’s credit card gives users 1.5% back on all purchases. On the flip side, Nexo lets users borrow crypto-backed credit lines on over 40 fiat currencies, accessible via a credit card that also gives users 2% cashback.

Nexo’s native token NEXO is available in most crypto exchanges. Its supply is pegged to 1bn tokens, and there are currently 560M NEXO in circulation.

The Court of Public Opinion: BlockFi vs. Nexo Reddit

Many users prefer Nexo over BlockFi for its higher BTC rates. 

However, a good number prefer BlockFi because it doesn’t require that you hold any native token to access premium rates. 

Overall, support for both BlockFi and Nexo is stable across the board.

Customer Support

Both BlockFi and Nexo maintain a support center with FAQs and other customer information. Nexo’s support representatives are available 24/7. Users can contact BlockFi support at support@blockfi.com.

BlockFi vs. Nexo: Which is the Better Crypto Interest Account? 

BlockFi and Nexo are both considered two of the best cryptocurrency interest accounts. 

Both platforms use industry-leading security, and both have more or less disclosed enough information about their lending practices to give users a rough idea. 

If you had to pick BlockFi vs. Nexo, you should consider the following:

1. In order to get Nexo’s higher rates, you’d need to hold its token NEXO, which is fairly volatile. 
2. BlockFi has a sign-up bonus for CoinCentral readers of up to $250, whereas Nexo’s bonus offers $10 when signing up and depositing $100. 
3. BlockFi is a U.S.-based company, whereas Nexo is based in Europe. 
4. Nexo offers up to 12% APY on fiat currencies, with no charges for withdrawals or transfers, whereas BlockFi only offers interest on crypto. 

The choice to undertake the risk of using a cryptocurrency interest account is yours. 

For a more detailed dive, check out the full Nexo Review and BlockFi Review. 

The post BlockFi vs. Nexo: Which is the Best Crypto Interest Account? appeared first on CoinCentral.

Gemini is regarded as a pioneer in the cryptocurrency industry. It has built its reputation with a suite of products and features, such as the Gemini exchange and wallet, a stablecoin GUSD, and Gemini Pay, a feature for users to pay with crypto at traditional businesses like Bed, Bath and Beyond. 

With Gemini Earn, Gemini throws its hat into the ring of the world’s best cryptocurrency interest accounts— an increasingly competitive industry that includes BlockFi, Celsius, and competing exchange Coinbase.

The following guide explores how Gemini Earn works, its features, the interest rates it offers on various cryptocurrencies, security, and how it compares to its competition. 

Gemini Earn Quick Summary

Announced in February 2021, Gemini Earn is a relative newcomer to the cryptocurrency interest account niche. The parent exchange, however, has been around since 2014 and is founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

1. Gemini Earn lets users earn up to 7.40% APY on 50+ cryptocurrencies, including BTC at 1.65%, ETH at 2.05%, 7.40% on DAI, GUSD, and more.
2. Security: Gemini Trust Inc. is Gemini’s custodian. It’s a regulated company with over $30 billion in crypto assets, industry-leading crypto security practices, and only up to some hundred thousand dollars in insurance coverage. 
3. Gemini Earn is only available to Gemini users in the United States and Singapore.
4. Users can withdraw their cryptocurrency anytime, at no fees.
5. The platform is beginner-friendly and accessible via a mobile app or a desktop-accessible web app.

Frequent users of the Gemini exchange can seamlessly use Gemini Earn, and they may find familiarity in the established brand. However, if you’re new to Gemini or the cryptocurrency interest account space at large, let’s explore whether either would be a fit for you. 

Gemini Earn Review: Interest Account and Interest Rates

Although its rates on major coins like BTC and ETH are not as impressive as those of Celsius or BlockFi, Gemini Earn offers a fairly competitive 7.4% APY on stablecoins.

Here’s a look:

Users can earn 2.05% APY on BTC and ETH and up to 7.40% for DAI and GUSD. 

Although Gemini Earn’s interest rates may be better than nothing, it’s worth noting that crypto interest accounts still pose a risk— not only are your assets under the custody of another platform, they’re also uninsured. 

You can earn about 5% on <0.5 BTC on BlockFi, and 6.2% on <2 BTC on Celsius. Still, neither platform comes with as established a reputation for security and custody as Gemini. 

However, Gemini Earn is just about a percentage point off of the stablecoin rates on Celsius and BlockFi, so it may be a good holding place for some of your stablecoin assets and collect relatively passive income. 

How Does Gemini Earn Make Money?

Gemini, the parent company, has a few distinct revenue lines. 

Its cryptocurrency interest account product, however, is able to pay its users’ interest by making loans to corporate borrowers with user deposits. 

Gemini does not charge any collateral for these loans. Instead, the company performs comprehensive background checks, regular asset evaluations, and in-depth risk assessments on its corporate creditors. It also informs users to whom it lends their funds.

Although well known for its top-notch security and insurance practices, Gemini does not insure funds you use in the Earn program. Here’s how they put it in their terms.

As of this writing, Gemini Earn only has one corporate borrower: Genesis Global Capital, a digital asset lender offering liquidity to large firms.

While earning relatively passive income on cryptocurrency sounds good, it’s not risk-free. Gemini’s terms state that users bear all the risk for its unsecured loans, as there is no collateral incentive to decrease the chances of a borrower default. It‘s essential to consider the risk you may be undertaking.

Gemini Earn Review: How Safe is Gemini Earn?

Assets in Gemini Earn are not insured by the company, which isn’t rare; most crypto interest platforms (with the exception of Hodlnaut) do not offer insurance for your assets after they’re loaned. Users should also take note of the platform’s security. So. Are your Satoshis safe on Gemini Earn? 

So far, Gemini passes the safety benchmark. It is a New York Trust company and is subject to the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). Gemini has completed SOC 1 Type 2, and SOC 2 Type 2 exams from Deloitte and earned an ISO 27001 certification. 

As of this writing, Gemini’s platform has never been hacked. 

How to Use Gemini Earn

If you don’t have a Gemini Earn account, you can make one with this link and get a signup bonus of $10 (in BTC).

To start earning interest on Gemini, you’ll have to move funds (either from your existing balance or by buying new tokens) to an “Earn” account. 

Gemini lets users withdraw funds from Earn at any time without charging fees. 

You don’t need to hold any minimum balance to use Gemini Earn, although it can take up to five days for Gemini to process your withdrawal.

Gemini Earn Review: Fees

Gemini Earn charges an “agent fee” on each token you earn on. The rate you receive on a given token is a net of this fee, meaning that Gemini’s charges are already subtracted from the interest rates they advertise. 

These agent fees may change at any time, and Gemini will notify you of these changes.

Ease of Use

Since Earn is built into Gemini, users can access the crypto interest feature on desktop and mobile.

However, Gemini Earn is currently only available in the US and Singapore, while the exchange is available worldwide, including the US, Canada, Singapore, and the UK. If the Earn feature isn’t in your app, it might not be available in your country.

Promos and Bonuses

CoinCentral readers can get a signup bonus of $10 (in BTC) if they buy or sell assets worth $100 during their first 30 days on the platform. 

The platform’s referral program also gives users $10 for each referral they make who does the same. 

Gemini Earn Review Final Thoughts: Is It Worth It?

Gemini Earn is a gamechanger for active Gemini users— they can now earn passive income on holdings they may already keep on Gemini’s tried-and-true exchange and wallet. 

The stablecoin APY is decent and Gemini offers interest, although meager at times, on a wide variety of cryptocurrency assets. However, we advise you research Gemini’s prospective creditors to completely understand the potential risk you may be undertaking.

Gemini Earn comes with Gemini’s strong brand, its large community, security, and customer support practices, which indicate Gemini has a strong foundation to enhance their cryptocurrency interest product in the future. 

Gemini maintains a comprehensive knowledge base featuring FAQs and how-tos, standing out for above-average customer service, making it a great choice for beginners. 

The closest comparison to Gemini Earn is Coinbase, which is slowly gathering momentum behind its own cryptocurrency interest account offering. Both are massive legacy exchanges dabbling in this space. 

However, if you’re looking for a company that specializes in cryptocurrency interest accounts, we recommend checking out BlockFi and Celsius— both offer higher rates across the board.

The post Gemini Earn Review: Is Gemini’s Crypto Interest Account Feature Worth it? appeared first on CoinCentral.

Cool Perk #1 Commission-Free Trading: So, how does Voyager offer commission-free trading? It routes its customers’ crypto transactions to various exchanges, helping to find the best rates.

Cool Perk #2 Cryptocurrency Interest Account: Funds you hold in Voyager automatically earn interest unless you opt-out in the app settings. Its rates are competitive with most cryptocurrency interest account options.

Voyager Invest Quick Summary

Voyager Digital Ltd. traces its origins to 2017, and the Voyager app went live in 2019.  Today, it is regarded as a good entry point for users of all experience levels, allowing them to manage their portfolios without operating different accounts with various exchanges. 

1. Voyager helps users buy cryptocurrencies from over a dozen exchanges within its app. 
2. It allows users to earn up to 10% APY on 50+ cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, USDC, LTC, DAI, DODGE, and BCH. Users must maintain a minimum balance to qualify for crypto interest.
3. Voyager is available in all states in the US, besides New York. It is not yet available internationally.
4. Voyager is “100% commission-free” and only accepts fees when it saves you money while brokering.
5. It has a remarkably straightforward signup process and allows users to begin trading as soon as their transfers clear.

Current Sign-Up Bonus: Get $25 when trading $100 on Voyager Invest.

Voyager Invest is unique in that it is a publically traded company, listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange (CSE) under the symbol VYGR.CN. It is also a  FinCen registered Money Services Business, and it trades in US OTC markets under the symbol VYGVF.

The Voyager Team

Voyager Invest is a US-regulated public company based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Voyager’s founding team has decades of experience in brokerage, investment, and market structure.

Its Founder and CEO is Stephen Ehlrich, who also founded broker-dealer Lightspeed Financial.

The rest of the C-suite includes Phillip Eytan, Gaspard de Dreuzy, and Oscar Salazar, the trio who co-founded Pager: a digital healthcare solution. 

CEO Stephen Ehlrich has worked in executive roles in the finance industry for decades. He spent seven years as the CEO of E*TRADE Professional Trading, a brokerage platform, Morgan Stanley subsidiary, and over six years as the CEO of Lightspeed Financial, an electronic trading company. 

Chairman Phillip Eytan worked with Morgan Stanly as a Telecom M&A Analyst. He also served as a director and founding investor with Socure, digital identity and fraud verifying service, and Pager.

President Gaspard de Dreuzy is a co-founder and the president of Pager and was the co-founder and CEO of Kapitall, an online stockbroker with video game-like trading tools, and free practice accounts for beginner investors. 

More popularly known as the Founding CTO and co-founder of Uber, Oscar Salazar brings his experience building consumer-driven experiences to advise the Voyager team. He is also a co-founder and the CTO of Pager.

Voyager Investors: How Much Has It Raised?

Voyager has raised over $100.1M in four funding rounds, comprising $110.5K during its Series C in October 2020 and 100M in a Series D in February 2021.

Voyager is a publicly-traded company registered under the ticket CNSX: VYGR. Their stock opened with $0.95 in its Feb 11, 2019, IPO, and its early investors include Streamlined Capital and Stifel Financial Corp.

Voyager Invest Review and Interest Rates

One distinct advantage Voyager has over other broker options is that it charges no commission. Whether users are looking to buy or sell their cryptocurrency, they’ll only pay the price quoted for that transaction. 

However, if Voyager manages to broker a deal better than the quoted price, they’ll keep a small percentage of the saved amount and send the rest to you. 

Voyager uses a technique coined “Smart Order Routing” to take advantage of pricing disparities between its 12+ partnered exchanges, getting you the best rate for your trade. 

Get $25 when signing up and trading $100 on Voyager Invest.

The Voyager broker supports over 50 cryptocurrencies.

When you transfer funds into your Voyager wallet, you automatically begin earning interest on those funds. Voyager offers up to 10% APY on 20+ tokens, slightly less than popular interest offerings like Celsius and slightly more than BlockFi.

To encourage the use of its in-house token VGX, Voyager offers higher APY rates to users who opt to receive their interest in VGX. This feature is not available in the US.

Unlike many crypto interest account providers, Voyager requires users to have a minimum monthly balance of each token held in their wallets to earn interest. These rates vary and are changed frequently. 

Generally, you can earn up to 9% APY on stablecoins, up to 6.25% on BTC with a minimum balance of 0.01BTC, and up to 5.25% APY on ETH with a minimum of 0.05%.

How to Sign Up for Voyager Invest + Promotions

Voyager simplified its account creation and verification considerably compared to most other cryptocurrency brokers, who require a complex signup and verification process before connecting users to the market. 

The entire process can take only a couple of minutes.  Once you sign up and submit some basic information, you can link a payment method, fund your account, and begin trading as soon as your transfer goes through. 

Voyager’s app has an in-built, constantly refreshing crypto news feed, and a profit-and-loss calculator. Users have access to up-to-date information on the cryptocurrency market movements and portfolio balances, profits, and losses over time. This feature is beneficial if you have many assets, as the profit and loss tool can help you figure out which tokens are doing well and which aren’t. 

Overall, Voyager’s mobile app is a well-thought-out product. However, if you prefer managing your investments from your laptop, you’re out of luck– Voyager has yet to release a desktop version. Its service is available only on mobile at the time of this writing, which is still pretty useful for trading on the go. However, Voyager is only available in the US and operates in all US states but in New York.

Another thing to note is that Voyager doesn’t support trading between cryptocurrencies at this time. You can only purchase crypto with fiat, and you can only convert your crypto to fiat, not a different coin.

So, if you’d like to sell some of your LTC for ETH, you’d have to convert the LTC to USD, then send in a buy request for ETH. However, Voyager does allow you to transfer your crypto to external wallets.

How Does Voyager Invest Make Money?

Like most crypto interest account services, Voyager makes money by taking loans at a particular rate (the interest it offers you) and then using it as capital to provide loans at higher rates to corporate borrowers. 

Secondly, Voyager makes money on trades initiated by its users. If Voyager can get a better exchange rate for a given transaction that it has shown its user in the original price quote, it makes a percentage of the savings on that order. The remainder of the funds is sent to the user. 

Is Your Crypto Safe With Voyager Invest?

You’re probably quite interested in making sure any assets you may hold in Voyager are safe. It’s worth noting that as crypto can not be FDIC insured, your funds are never entirely risk-free. However, here are some steps Voyager takes to help mitigate that risk.

Platform Safety

Voyager uses 2FA and industry-standard encryption and other safety regulations to ensure that users of its platform are protected. However, Voyager’s domain name system server was hacked in December 2020. When it noticed the breach, the company forcefully took the system offline to secure its customers. According to Voyager, no funds or client data were compromised during the attack.

How are your assets protected?

Voyager’s partner bank insures all USD in its custody up to $250,000. Despite this, your crypto is not FDIC or SDIC insured. Voyager is a licensed and regulated public company in the US and undergoes regular audits. 

Voyager uses a number of custodians to protect its user’s assets, including Fireblocks and Ledger Vault. These custodians combine safety best practices, insurance to store crypto in hardware and hot wallets. 

In April 2021, Voyager exceeded $3.3 billion worth of assets under its management.

VGX and the Voyager Loyalty Program

VGX is the native, proprietary token of the Voyager platform. Voyager uses it to reward its users. These rewards can include earning higher interest rates (on VGX and tokens), cashback rewards, and more.

• VGX Interest: All VGX Tokens you hold on Voyager will automatically earn 7% APY for the first year. After that, holders gain the ability to vote on future yield rates.
• Cashback Rewards: When Voyager’s smart order router can achieve a price improvement, users receive 2x or 3x the price improvement usually given to customers, depending on their loyalty tier. This reward is paid out in VGX.
• Refer-a-Friend Rewards: Voyager has a sign-up and referral bonus of $25 for the referrer and the new user when the new user makes a trade of $100 or more. Depending on your loyalty tier, you can receive up to $40 for each person you refer to the Voyager app. The referrer will receive rewards in VGX, while the new user will receive their reward in BTC.

Voyager has many more perks for users of its VGX token:

Customer service

The well-maintained Voyager FAQ section is accessible via its app and website. The platform does not offer live phone support. To contact Voyager, create a support ticket in the “Help” section of the app.

Final Thoughts: Is Voyager Invest Legit?

Voyager offers an enticing mix of services. Its cryptocurrency interest account rates are competitive to Celsius and BlockFi, but the product has a few more hoops to jump through, such as the holding of a specific quantity of the VGX token. 

The smart order router helps get great deals for trades, which beats many exchanges at their own game.

Although its platform and custodian are relatively safe, Voyager offers loans using your assets, which is not risk-free.

In the future, Voyager intends to release a crypto debit card that will allow users to make purchases using their holdings. It also wants to release a desktop-accessible version of its platform.

The culmination of features and tokens is similar to the Crypto.com type platform, but with a simpler and more refined user experience.

From our analysis, Voyager doesn’t seem inherently riskier than any other crypto interest account provider. 

Its brokering feature is a valuable bit for users who prefer not to manage multiple accounts with exchanges. We love its in-built profit-and-loss and news features, and Voyager seems to be on an upward trend as its platform gains notability and its valuation grows.

Voyager is also working on getting a Bitlicense, which will allow it to operate within New York and internationally.

Voyager Invest Alternatives: Other Crypto Interest and Exchange Platforms

BlockFi is an excellent choice for you if you’re outside the US. It’s available internationally and in all US states but New York. BlockFi offers a crypto exchange, interest account, and crypto-backed loans (meaning you can use your holdings as collateral for a loan). BlockGi’s platform supports over 15 tokens and uses industry-leading security practices. Read our BlockFi Review.

Robinhood is a good choice if you want to trade crypto alongside other stocks. Its portfolio platform is very beginner-friendly and lets you trade BTC, ETH, and five other cryptocurrencies alongside your stock, commission-free. 

Earn Up to 9% APY

Assets in your Voyager Invest account can earn interest on 30+ coins if you meet the minimum balance for each. Rates fluctuate, but Voyager claims users can earn up to 9% APY on stablecoins like USDC, 5.75% on Bitcoin, 4.6% on ETH, 3% on AAVE, and 4.5% on LINK.

Interest compounds monthly and accrues daily. The average monthly balance for specific coins capable of earning interest must meet a minimum to earn the interest for that month. You’ll earn interest on any qualified assets in your account, whether you purchased them on the Voyager platform or deposited them from an external wallet.

What Could be Improved

You can’t conduct coin-to-coin trades: Users can only trade coins to fiat. Voyager Invest claims it’s working on crypto to crypto trading. 

Get $25 when signing up and trading $100 on Voyager Invest.

The post Voyager Crypto Invest: Features, Perks, Cons, and Alternatives appeared first on CoinCentral.