On my way to discovering passive income, I arrived quite late to Celsius.
As I wrote in my previous article about Nexo, that was my first approach with this type of platform and, given Celsius was often presented as its "rival", I wasn’t getting the point in joining both.
I was happy with my Nexo account and, having bought Nexo tokens back in the day, I was gaining a higher interest than what Celsius advertised. Really no reason to switch.
TL;DR
This will be a long article so if you don’t have an account yet and are interested in joining, don't forget to read carefully the instructions at the bottom to gain an 80$ bonus on your first deposit!
The limited choices
What convinced me to give Celsius a chance was the limited choice of coins available on Nexo.
Everything is fine until you’re only dealing with BTC, ETH, and a few other major coins, but if you find yourself wanting to invest in some "newer" coins, you’re basically stuck. Celsius, on the other hand, has a slightly larger list of options that may come in handy for your needs.
Find the small differences
Instead of explaining everything from the beginning, I would like to focus on the differences between the two platforms, so you can make an informed choice and pick the one that best fits your needs.
Interest Rate
On Nexo you have 2 different interest rate ranges: one for stable coins (+ fiat) and one for other crypto assets. On Celsius, it really varies based on the coin you’re interested in. You have 2.5% for UNI up to 13.99% for MATIC. For BTC, they both start at 4%.
You can improve your interest rate by holding CEL tokens.
While on Nexo you can gain +2% just by deciding to get paid in NEXO, on Celsius you will get the same interest rate unless you reach a certain amount of CEL.
On the other hand, CEL is treated as any other asset, so once you get some, you will gain interest on that too!
You can trade CEL on some exchanges, but my advice here would be to let the platform give it to you! You can set your interest to be paid in CEL for some time and, once you got a few, switch to payment in the same coin, and still get some CELs as interest from your current CEL amount.
Interest Payment
One of my favorite Nexo features was the daily payment of interest. Of course, that also meant daily compounding of interest - so satisfying!
This also gave you the ability to switch daily whenever you preferred to earn interest in NEXO or in the same coin.
That kind of changed after I switch to the Locked Terms plan for most of my coins.
Celsius will credit your interest weekly, every Monday. This also means that the switch between being paid in CEL or in the same coin will be effective on the week following the switch.
It's also worth mentioning that, while on Nexo you either choose to have your interest be paid in NEXO or in the same currency - and this is a global setting - on Celsius you can have different settings for different coins.
Withdrawals
Withdrawals are free on both platforms, with Nexo recently limiting them to a monthly maximum due to high gas fees (this may be temporary, we hope).
Nexo withdrawals are taken out immediately to any address, while on Celsius they require a bit of a setup: you need to provide a withdrawal address and then wait for 24 hours before you can perform the actual transaction. The address will be memorized on the platform, so you need to do this only the first time you set a withdrawal address for a specific coin or any time you want to change it to a different address.
So my only tip here is: plan in advance your withdrawal on Celsius.
Referral & Sign Up bonuses FTW
Where Celsius really shines in comparison with Nexo is their referral system. If you’re new, there’s also a remarkable registration bonus. Best thing? You can have both!
Where’s the trick? You need to deposit at least 400$ of a single asset and don’t touch them for a month. Until last month, this used to be only 200$, so I’m quite sad to give you this news. Anyway, I hope you already have some assets that you're planning to hold for a long time and you could use for this purpose.
I will try to explain the full procedure in detail:
- Download the Celsius app and start a new registration process.
- In the registration screen, open the "Have a referral code?" drop-down. In here, insert a referral code of your choice (for example, mine is 124724d02c - the app will automatically fill it for you if you click this link)
- After completing the registration, check this page to find out the latest promo code available (this changes periodically). You will need to enter this code directly from the app after your registration (detailed instructions)
- Start the KYC to verify your identity. It will ask for some personal details and a picture of your ID.
- Wait for your identity to be verified. You should receive a confirmation e-mail.
- Transfer at least 400$ of a single asset of your choice to your Celsius wallet within 10 days. Be careful because this is tricky: you will need to do one single transfer of at least that amount, and your balance must remain above 400$ for at least 30 days. This might be hard with crypto, where a 20-30% daily correction is not strange at all. So my advice would be to either transfer a much larger amount (for example 600-700$) or use a stablecoin.
- To confirm that everything went as planned, you should see immediately the pending funds on your wallet (they will show in the transactions list for the specific coin). After 30 days, the funds will be officially credited to your wallet and will show on your balance.
At the moment of writing, you should receive 40$ as the registration bonus (the code from the website) and another 40$ with the referral code (and the lucky owner of the code you used will receive 40$ as well - thank you so much if you choose me!).
So… which one should I choose?
Short answer: both!
I still prefer Nexo for the higher interest and the nice app, but I also use Celsius for the coins that are not on Nexo.
My general advice when talking about crypto or investments in general is to avoid a single point of failure, so dividing your assets may just be a smart move!