An Open Letter to Nexo

Oh baby, baby it’s a wild world

Hi Nexo, Celsius here.

We’re a company that offers blockchain asset- backed cash loans, too. Great idea, right?

We heard about your recent offer to buy out SALT Lending and its portfolio of loans. And while Karin Metodiev, your head of corporate finance said on CNBC that the gesture was a friendly one with a “pure intention to help,” we think that moves like this are unhealthy for everyone in the crypto lending space.

Why, you ask? Simply put, we’re all in this together. That means any action made to make one competitor look bad hurts all of us, and will eventually drag us all down. We think that instead, we should all be focused on growing and improving the concept of crypto-backed loans together.

It’s hard to get by just upon a smile

While we realize a war of words may be futile, it’s important for us to speak up. We feel your offer was in poor taste and hurtful, not only to SALT but to the crypto community as a whole. Our community likes contributing to similar projects, so FUDding another project to prop up your own ultimately hurts everyone because many of NEXO’s token holders are likely SALT (and CELSIUS) token holders as well.

The better the community does, the better we all do. That’s why we should all be working hard on bringing trust and stability to our entire market, two things that are critical to our joint mission. Let’s ensure our future by helping crypto go mainstream.

I’ll always remember you like a child, girl

Although it seems like cryptocurrency is exploding in popularity (and in many ways, it is), the truth is it’s still very small compared to other, more established financial markets. As such, the actions of just one company can have widespread and long-lasting impact on others in potentially unforeseen ways.

Look at how we all try so hard to disassociate with anything related to BitConnect, and for good reason. Remember that just recently EOS was made into an example on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver as an ICO full of vague promises and no product, and how the NYT mocked us in a recent op-ed for being a chauvinistic male dominated industry that is taking advantage of a hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico for its tax haven status. One former child actor in a cowboy hat hugs a tree, and we all look like idiots.

You know I’ve seen a lot of what the world can do

Here’s one way to look at it. In the United States today, there are only three major credit reporting bureaus. One of them, Equifax, suffered a massive hack where potentially hundreds of millions of Americans had their personal information compromised. This reflected poorly on the credit industry as a whole as well as the two other credit companies, Experian and Transunion. Both had to act fast in order to try and defend their own brands even though their respective companies had nothing to do with the hack.

The credit reporting industry has been around for decades, but crypto-backed lending is still in its infancy, so throwing shade at one company makes all of us look bad, including Nexo.

We crypto companies may not always agree on everything, but discrediting our shared business model is not going to help any of us.

And it’s breaking my heart in two

It’s important to have respect and reverence for your elders. That’s a pretty well-established cultural norm in most places around the world. But does that same logic apply when it comes to businesses?

Give SALT credit where credit is due: they were the first movers and shakers in the space and debatably the company that invented the concept of crypto-backed loans. They were the ones that popularized the idea of crypto-backed loans through detailed and broad marketing efforts that helped spread the idea.

So how should we treat our elders? One person who sets a good example in this regard is Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum. Instead of FUDing bitcoin, Buterin speaks highly of it, and shows the old coin the respect it deserves, crediting it for the innovation cascade we all benefit from today.

This doesn’t mean that our crypto ancestors are immune to criticism; no crypto startup is perfect. But it does mean that we should, at the very least, show our peers the respect that they earned and deserve. Yours and our crowdsale would have been much harder if SALT did not pioneer the lending space in crypto.

Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there

Before we go, just one last thought. Nexo, our dear Bulgarian friends, we don’t hold grudges!

On the contrary, we respect what you do and we think that your business model will offer a number of solutions that will help us all grow. Also, we think we will all thrive in a competitive market place, and completely agree with SALT’s CEO, Bill Sinclair who said: “We always expected to have competitors,” and that having competitors is “proof that you have a good business model”.

The only way we can build a benevolent economy is through a competitive marketplace. Competition will drive us all to outdo ourselves with more and better offerings that the public wants and needs.This isn’t a “zero-sum game” or one where “winner takes all.” We’re all in this space because we’re bullish on it, and we all know that every new bull run brings a new wave of folks into crypto.

That’s why this space is so exciting, and that’s why every year we’ll have a bigger and bigger market.

Nexo, this is why we came here today to ask you to reconsider your strategy which, intentionally or not, could harm the legitimacy of our entire shared space. Instead join us: SALT Lending, Ethlend, and anyone else engaging in friendly competition in our shared space of crypto-backed lending. There’s a spot at the dinner table and plenty of chicken (or in our case, veggie dumplings), so come on over and let’s share a beer, or three.

Warmly,

Your friends at Celsius Network

An Open Letter to Nexo was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.