Bob Mally

Celsius (CEL) is an all-in-one banking and financial services platform for cryptocurrency users.

Launched in June 2018, it offers rewards for depositing cryptocurrency, along with services such as loans and wallet-style payments.

Users of the platform receive regular payouts and interest on their holdings. Celsius’ native token, CEL, performs a variety of internal functions, including boosting user payouts if used as the payment currency.

Celsius originally came into being as the product of creators Alex Mashinsky and Daniel Leon in 2017.

Mashinsky has a long-running history in the internet development sphere, having worked on the Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) in the 1990s and other technologies since. Celsius is far from Mashinsky’s first corporate venture, with seven startups and 35 patents to his name, the project’s official website states.

Co-founder and COO Daniel Leon meanwhile has experience focusing on growing early-stage startups. His previous roles include being CEO of Atlis Labs, a social recommendation and discovery app which used real-time user referrals.

Celsius now has a large team of core employees, technical developers and advisors with experience in various spheres.

Celsius aims to outperform banks at their own game by offering financial services on the kind of terms which traditional financial institutions no longer offer.

These include much higher rates of returns on savings and deposits, much easier and fairer loan requirements and automated rewards computed for each user algorithmically. Penalties and bank-style fees are also waived.

The platform also functions as a wallet via its CelPay feature, and hosts its own CEL token which users can leverage to increase payout value among other things.

As a for-profit company, Celsius takes a cut of profit margins on interest payments, still returning 80% to users themselves. The company also lends to institutional entities such as hedge funds.

Payments are ensured because loans are asset-backed, and any borrower must supply more than 100% of what they borrow in the destination currency.

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Who Are the Founders of Casper?

Mrinal Manohar, Co-Founder and CEO

What Makes Casper Unique?

How Many Casper Coins (CSPR) Are There in Circulation?

.How Is the Casper Network Secured?

Theta Fuel (TFUEL) is one of the two native tokens on the Theta blockchain. TFUEL should not be mistaken for Theta Token (THETA), which is the governance token of the Theta blockchain supported by thousands of community-run Guardian nodes and its Enterprise validators including Google, Binance, Blockchain ventures, Gumi and Samsung.

TFUEL is the second token on the Theta blockchain that serves as the utility token in decentralized video and data delivery, it also acts as a gas token. This means that it is used to power all operations on the Theta blockchain, like payments to relayers for sharing a video stream, for deploying and interacting with smart contracts, and as fees associated with transacting NTFs and DeFi applications.

In addition, it is also used to incentivize users in the ecosystem who share their redundant computing power as Edge Compute nodes as well as bandwidth resources as Edge Caching nodes for video streams and other data.

Theta Fuel, and in extension, the entire Theta Ecosystem, was co-founded by Mitch Liu and Jieyi Long in 2017. Liu has a long history in the gaming, video and virtual reality industries, co-founding video advertising firm Tapjoy, mobile social gaming startup Gameview Studios, and THETA.tv, the live streaming platform whose DApp was the first to be built on the Theta protocol.

Jieyi Long is Theta’s second co-founder and CTO, following similar multi-year experience in design automation, gaming, VR, and large scale distributed systems. He authored multiple peer-reviewed academic papers and holds various patents in video streaming, blockchain and virtual reality.

Theta now has a modest team, and its official website lists strategic corporate investors as Samsung NEXT, Sony Innovation Fund, media investors BDMI Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, CAA Creative Artists Agency, and traditional Silicon Valley VCs including DCM, Sierra Ventures and the VR Fund.

Theta’s main use case is decentralizing video streaming, data delivery and edge computing, making it more efficient, cost-effective and fair for industry participants. The network runs on a native blockchain, with two native tokens, known as Theta (THETA) and Theta Fuel (TFUEL), powering the internal economy.

Theta’s appeal is threefold: viewers get rewarded with better quality streaming service, content creators improve their earnings and middlemen — video platforms — save money on building infrastructure and increase advertising, subscription revenues. Users have an incentive to both watch network content and share network resources, as rewards come in the form of TFUEL tokens.

The platform is open source, and token holders receive governance powers as with many proof-of-stake (PoS)-based blockchain ecosystems. In addition to video, data and computing, Theta caters to developers looking to launch decentralized applications (DApps) such as DeFi and NFTs on its fully featured EVM-compatible smart contract platform.

As earlier mentioned, there are two coins in the Theta ecosystem; THETA and TFUEL. Both coins are used as the main tools for interaction on the Theta blockchain, yet serve different functions.

There are currently 5,232,675,200 TFUEL coins in circulation, which grows each year as new TFUEL is generated for staking rewards. Theta Tokens are fixed and at their max supply, which means there are 1,000,000,000 coins in circulation which will never increase.

Theta runs on the proof-of-stake algorithm, which means staking is possible. Since the amount of THETA in circulation is the max supply there will ever be, TFUEL is the reward for staking on the network. To qualify for staking, you have to stake at least 1,000 THETA to a Guardian Node or run your own Guardian Node.

The Theta Blockchain relies on a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm. It, however, adds a multi-level Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus mechanism on its blockchain to achieve better security along with higher transaction throughput.

At the time of Theta Mainnet launch in March 2019, Theta introduced Guardian Nodes. With the Guardian Node, no single entity controls the majority of THETA tokens being staked at any one time. This further helps the network achieve a high transaction throughput of 1000+ TPS.

Theta uses a financial incentive scheme to ensure user participation in governance activities, and hence its network is secured by its own users.