COINS Podcast Speaker Highlight: Alex Mashinsky from Celsius Network
Alex Mashinsky is and entrepreneur and founder of several tech companies. In February 2017, Mashinsky founded and remains as CEO of the Celsius Network. The company claims to have built the first digital wallet that earns interest on 30 different cryptocurrency assets.
Recently, the Celsius Network announced an asset valuation of over $20 billion across nearly 1 million customers. A press release from the company claims it is the first CeFi or DeFi platform to break $20 billion.
In July, Celsius confirmed a $52 million investment in carbon-neutral bitcoin mining leader Core Scientific which offers high-performance, 100% net carbon-natural infrastructure and software solutions that power leading blockchain companies.
Mashinsky is a regular guest at MouseBelt’s virtual blockchain and cryptocurrency conference series, REIMAGINE. He also lent his perspective recently to COINS, the podcast covering the history of bitcoin and cryptocurrency from its inception to today.
Throughout the podcast, Mashinsky provides his deep institutional knowledge from his time before crypto and during. In the 10th episode of the podcast, “2020, All Time High,” he talks about the 2020 bitcoin and cryptocurrency rally. While the economies of the world went into emergency mode, blockchain-based currencies saw massive growth.
He said there wasn’t just a single thing that’s led to the recent surge in crypto. “We had a flash crash during the Corona correction, so that’s March 12, 2020… lost 40 percent of its value, Ethereum lost 60 percent of its value in the same time,” he explained. “That kind of flushed out a lot of sellers.”
Then, he continued, in came the “new ambassadors” for crypto.
Watch episode 10 of COINS now!
Alongside running Celsius Network, Mashinsky is also a founder and managing partner of Governing Dynamics, an Israeli-American venture fund investing in companies in Israel.
In terms of his education, he received a Bachelor of Engineering at the Open University of Israel in 1982 and a Bachelor of Science at Tel Aviv University.
On June 26, 2021, Mashinsky claimed that Bitcoin will go all the way to $160,000 by the end of the year. On October 10, the value of Bitcoin was just over $55,000.
Alex Mashinsky has appeared three times at REIMAGINE(https://www.ri2020.io/), the virtual blockchain and cryptocurrency conference put on by MouseBelt (https://mousebelt.com/). Alex has over 114k followers on Twitter.
He spoke at REIMAGINE V1.0, the inaugural conference in May of 2020. He also talked at V7.0: “History of Coins,” and at V4.0: “Tales from the Crypt(O).”
Mashinsky Has Been in Tech and Communications Since 1995
From 2003 to 2016, he was the founder and chairman of Transit Wireless (TW), which was a $300 million project that operated the world’s largest DAS LTE wireless systems in the 300 NYC underground subway stations.
Between April of 2014 and November of 2015, he was also the CEO and board member at the Inseego Corp, which was formerly known as Novatel Wireless Inc. He joined as CEO with 200 employees, $20 million in revenues, and 14 quarters of losses, and left the company to start Celsius two years later with 400 employees and $450 million in revenues and profitability. The company itself delivered specialized wireless solutions to carriers, distributors, and retailers on a worldwide scale.
Prior to this venture, he was a board member at Tellabs, which is a company that works to deliver fast and secure access to optimized network performance.
From the span of 2005 to 2013, he was the founder and CEO of GroundLink, which was one of the first companies out there to create on-demand ride-sharing with the first application available on iPhone and Android devices in 2007, and offered this service in over 500 cities on a worldwide scale.
Mashinsky was also a member of the Metro New York Chapter and investor at nSphere where he served the role of the adviser to the founder and CEO and was an angel investor.
He was also the Founder, CEO, and board member of Arbinet, from 1995 to 2010. The company had over 2500 phone companies as members which exchanged over 20 billion transactions per year. Arbinet merged with Primus in 2011 and combined a total of $1.5 billion in annual revenues.
