CelsiusX Launches Cross-Chain Liquidity Bridge - Interview With Carl Hua - Crypto Breakdown February 22, 2022

Episode Summary:

In this episode, I speak with Carl Hua, General Manager and Chief Architect of CelciusX about their DeFi launch at https://celsiusx.network/

Guest:

Carl Hua, General Manager and Chief Architect of CelciusX

For developer applications to CelciusX: email [email protected]

Hosts:

Joe Dewitt Follow at: https://twitter.com/metabitz

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Unedited Transcript:

Hey everybody happy Tuesday. My name is Joe Dewitt and this is the crypto breakdown. And today I have a special guest GM and chief architect over at CelsiusX Carl Hua. How are you doing, man?

Carl: Good. Good. Thanks for inviting me here. 

Q: absolutely. We're glad you're happy here. Carl, if you wanted to just give a quick rundown of CelsiusX to those out there, listening that are unaware of the platform and want to learn a little bit more.

Carl: So before I go into CelsiusX, Celsius itself is a digital asset platform where we perform various services to our users are primarily users are able to generate yield on. And Celsius X really is the defy arm of Celsius. We're our mission really is to build infrastructure into defy so that we're able to reduce the friction in which we onboard users entity.

Q:And you mentioned that DeFi arm. What is that?

Carl: DeFi stands for decentralized finance today where track five, which are the banks that provide day-to-day sir financial services to the general public, in a web decentralist decentralized finance, which lives on the blockchain. The entire infrastructure is essentially decentralized. There is no centralized entity to control the flow of money. People transact with each other using something called smart contract, which is essentially programs that run on the blockchain and the are various protocols and programs been built on the blockchain to allow financial services to be.

Q: So I'm aware that you guys have an upcoming launch for the DeFi arm. If you want to go ahead and talk about,

Carl: So the initial two product offering CelsiusX is launching with our one liquidity bridge and then two, the initial set of wrapped tokens that we'll be launching with the liquidity bridge. So how this will work is really today. There are many blockchains out there. They don't need to operate. They don't really talk to each other. So assuming that you have assets on one blockchain it's rather difficult for you to move from one blockchain to another blockchain, right? There are some very primitive bridges have been built, but the overall security and usability.Is simply not good enough  for the community. So Celsius X is launching it, liquidity bridge, leveraging the entire infrastructure of Celsius, and we would allow users to deposit and withdraw native token. And the coins on one blockchain and allow them to withdraw on polygon so that people can actually move across various blockchain.

Q:And when is that launching?

Carl: We are launching this on February 22nd now, us to start, and we are looking to bring us into the ecosystem as well as we. Do additional testing, how many active users does the Celsius X network have? So for us, we have more than 1 million users today in the crypto industry. It's significant. We look to expand our user base over time.

Q: And so Carl, how is the CelsiusX. Liquidity bridge going to be a little bit different than some of the other options out there.

Carl: Yes. So if you look at this industry today, especially in the bridging ecosystem, they're largely decentralized, meaning they're actually knows no single party that's controlling the fund. Some of the decentralization is questionable, right. And that has been a couple of hacks in the past. And I anticipate more in the more bridges will be. So we generally believe that institutional adoption is inevitable. And I just don't see a way that given the current state of the decentralized bridges, that we will be able to attract institutional players into the field. Our liquidity bridge is eventually we'll go into the decentralization process, but initially we'll start with the centralized bridge, which is controlled by the Celsius backend secured by our custodian, which is fire blocks. They've been great to work with. So security is. A top concern for entities like Celsius. When we mechanize this type of framework, the other side of the thing is that there are other wrapped token offerings in this industry, though. They're not really retail friendly, right? Meaning that they've wrapped the Tokyo. For the projects or institutions. And if you're a retail and you get ahold of these Ratto case, there's not an easy way for you to go back to the native form.

With that said our Celsius X offering really is geared towards not only institutions as well. We're also looking to penetrate the retail market. So for our wrap token, you're able to deposit withdraw at any given time. So it's real time redemption in. We also have stale. Transparency and accountability.

What that means is that we're actually integrating with a decentralized Oracle services, such as chain link to prove that we're actually one-to-one back, we're not as not depositing the coin somewhere in telling you, Hey, it's. With our custodian, right? We're actually pointing the decentralized Oracle prover reserve service into our wallet or a decentralized vault, depending on the architecture and the types of tokens we're wrapping in.

We're broadcasting that to the target, blockchain that. We'll be maintaining the tokens.  At any given time you're able to audit us and we're not the person that's providing the audit, it's link. They have more than a hundred billion dollars secured. So it's a very proven system to show transparency.

And not only that we have deeply integrated. Hoover reserve into our smart contracts, which will be maintaining the tokens and the we're doing a hard deadline check. If we're at we're not properly, collaterized Celsius is not going to be able to mend the toolkits. So this way we're establishing accountability as well as transparency and all that data is publicly available on our websites.

Q: That's awesome to Hear that you guys are using chain-link Oracles. That's super interesting. Just essentially simplifying the whole process too.

Carl: For everyday users be able to bridge on bridge and wrap and unwrap their tokens. Initially it will be centralized in we'll over time. Decentralization is more multi-dimensional effort, right? And over time we'll decentralize. And we're also teaming up with chain-link to utilize their decentralized protocol called the us CCIP in the future to be able to do. Mechanized this entire infrastructure in a decentralized fashion. So essentially we'll have two concurrent roadmap, right? One's decentralization.

And the other ones aggressively expand our offerings through our existing infrastructure.

Q: Is there a place for individuals out there who want to check out the bridging platform when it launches? Is there a place to go to find it or is it just the CelsiusX website

Carl: So there's two places for the actual wrapping and unwrapping. Please go to the Celsius website. There's a web app. We're not enabling mobile app on day one, but the web app allows you for bridging for additional information on the actual technology. Our roadmap, you can go on https://celsiusx.network/  We have the comprehensive documentation on there. The transparency report, as well as the real-time collateralization ratio is all listed on the website as well.

Q:So as you guys look to expand the Celsius network, are you looking to onboard any new developers or expand your team

Carl: Yes. Thank you, Joe, for asking this. developers, these days are extremely hard to onboard. They're almost like exotic animals.  We have a dedicated email for those of you, those developers that would like to join us.

And that email is X the letter, just one letter [email protected]. And that will be reading these emails myself. So we have a very good pipeline there. So please don't hesitate to reach.

Q: I also got a quick personal question for you. Of course, I had the connect on LinkedIn. I saw that you were a flight software engineer.

I was just wondering how you went from aerospace over to DeFi?

Carl: I started my career in the aerospace industry and then quickly transitioned that to the spacing. That's true. Working for JPL NASA out of a Pasadena. It was a very interesting career path though. I. Brought into the blockchain world.

When the original Bitcoin white paper was published, frat, that was 2009. I downloaded a copy on the Bitcoin talk forum. And ever since it's being, there's just a voice in my head. Hey Carl, like probably you want to do something there took me a while, as you can see, I didn't really transition until 2017.

There was not really a trigger except for the fact that. I lost 95% of my portfolio backing the crash in late 2017. And I just doubled down because I I believed in this and that one day I just woke up and said, this is it. So I moved from California to New York to join a first layer of blockchain first layer.

Meaning there, there are multiple layers layer, one, the startup, and the rest is history

Q: For those of you listening out there that want to go check out their website, https://celsiusx.network/. Make sure to go give it a look, Carl, thank you so much for being on the show . That about wraps it up. That's all the time we have for today, guys.

Thank you so much for tuning in Carl. You were a fabulous guest. I want to thank you again for coming on the show and talking to us.