Crypto Lender Celsius Taps Chainlink's Price Oracles for Interest Rate 'Decentralization'

Lending platform Celsius Network has teamed with an oracle provider to make the price feeds it uses to calculate crypto asset interest rates less centralized.

Announced Monday, Celsius has subscribed to Chainlink, which connects smart contracts with real-world data, as a middle pathway to decentralization, said Chainlink CEO Serey Nazarov in a telephone interview with CoinDesk.

Celsius offers above-market interest rate returns for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, and has some $600 million in assets under management. Under the new arrangement, Chainlink will also place a portion of its bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) crypto holdings under Celsius' treasury management service.

Chainlink launched its live network in June 2019, having raised $32 million in a token sale in 2017. Chainlink provides pricing data for cryptocurrency applications through a series of smart contracts meshing on- and off-chain data into one price feed.

Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications have become a prime applicant for Chainlink in the last few months given the more robust nature of oracles over other pricing data solutions, the firm said. Polkadot became the first non-Ethereum blockchain to integrate Chainlink just a month ago.

Most technical or financial projects often see decentralization as an all or nothing effort, according to Nazarov. Chainlink adds one building block that projects can use to decentralize, in what he described as a “hybrid cloud blockchain application.”

“We’re allowing [Celsius] to make data inputs decentralized and what this can do is it can create a certain amount of guarantees we can show on-chain," Nazarov said.

Read more: Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov on What DeFi Can Learn From Early Exchange Hacks

Describing the service, he explained: "Here's the data that you were supposed to compute, here's the number you would have computed if your computations were working correctly and then here's the payment output you sent me.”

Chainlink joins other crypto-first entities such as the Litecoin Foundation in depositing funds for interest accrual. Nazarov said the deposits were “significant” portions of the treasury.

“Integrating Chainlink’s industry-leading decentralized oracle technology is the key step in the continued decentralization of Celsius [and] helps solidify our mission to bring revolutionary financial services to millions around the world,” said Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky in a statement.

The partnership follows hectic weeks in the cryptocurrency lending markets which saw millions in collateral called in to solidify outstanding loans. Mashinsky called March 12, or "Black Thursday," the "best day ever" for the firm after completing more loans than ever, while seeing interest rates skyrocket for some cryptocurrencies.