Staggering Interest Rates
In the UK, the Bank of England is clamping down on interest rates on savings accounts… a long way down… to 0.01%! I’ve read a few articles now about how seriously the bank is considering to implement so called “negative interest rates” and getting the high street banks ready for them, where they will charge you for making a deposit at the very least and take money from you? No thanks!
This isn’t live yet but I’ve been telling my friends that it will be on the way for a few months now and to look for other options. Most of them laughed of course, “This will never happen, that’s a new one, where do you get these wild ideas from?”
Still, I’ll share what I’ve been trying out on the ground with my own dabbles in the hope that it helps those who want to dive in and not have their spending power being eaten away by inflation and impending negative interest rates in “traditional UK savings accounts”, earn at least a little something.
Celsius
I mentioned Celsius a couple of weeks ago after finding out about it from good friend @chekohler and how I was warming to the idea of having an interest rate/return on BTC savings. Yes, I can now call myself a BTC saver with the CeFi (centralised finance) options available! All you need to do is deposit the tokens they support and leave it in there – interest will start coming in weekly installments from then on.
Celsius referral link here which will give you $20 of Bitcoin if you deposit $200 worth in your first deposit – you can just deposit BTC from another source, you don’t have to buy it in app
A quick glance over on Celsius’ website reveals the available rates for holding tokens – check their rates out here. Today, I want to talk about “True GBP”, seeing as I’m from the UK and had my mind blown when I did a bit of research last night/this morning – check out the rates offered for this:
As you can see, just holding True GBP will give you a 10.51% return but if your Celsius portfolio has >15% CEL tokens, you can earn 13.86%! That’s insane! But what is True GBP?
True GBP (tGBP)
Those with a bit of exposure to crypto will know this as a “stable coin” – it’s a token whose value is pegged/matched with the current value of the fiat currency. So 1 True GBP = £1. The tGBP token is based on Ethereum (ERC 20 token) but it’s not too easy to get your hands on as yet.
I was seeing how I could get it on the Celsius app but it pointed me towards the “Trust Token” website where you have to register and no doubt go through another KYC process (I can’t say for sure, just my inkling). I’ve done KYC a few times and I’d rather not have another site asking for these details but there is thankfully another option that I’m already set up for – Uniswap!
Uniswap
This is a site where you can swap/exchange different ethereum (ERC 20) tokens for one another without having to go through exchanges and KYC to do so. All you need is to set up a browser extension called Metamask which will provide you your ETH wallet, connect it with Uniswap and away you go! You’ll probably need to buy some ETH first though and send it to your Metamask wallet.
On the Uniswap interface, you will need to find the tGBP token in the “To” bit first and then enter the amount of tGBP you want to buy:
Then you go through the confirmation process and the rest of it and wait a couple of minutes for the transaction to complete. Yes, you will have to pay some fees on Ethereum for each transaction but you will make that back I’m sure!
If you don’t see tGBP in your Metamask, you will need to set it up – there are a couple of ways to do this. The way Metamask explain it can be found here but I had a bit of trouble making tGBP a permanent fixture in my Metamask wallet so you need to select “add token” in the screenshot below:
In the box that appears select “custom token” and you need to fill out the boxes. Head to Etherscan to find the information you need and copy the information in the bit circled red to the Metamask fields – then confirm and you should see tGBP in your Metamask wallet:
Start Earning Interest In Celsius
The final step is to then deposit your newly acquired tGBP in to Celsius so go to “add coins” in the app, find tGBP in the list and you’ll get a deposit address for tGBP – send from Metamask to this address (be sure to check it’s correct) and you will receive the tokens in your Celsius wallet, where it will start earning that sweet 10.51% interest!
Convoluted Process?
Well, I mentioned the other day about how I don’t like paying too many fees and this process is the cheapest one I discovered this morning but am open to other options should you be able to find it. The simpler option of going through Trust Token I suspect will have more fees, I looked at doing the swap through Metamask but damn, that would have hit me with £20 fee so in the end, this is what I did:
- Deposit GBP to Coinbase from bank account
- Deposit this GBP in Coinbase Pro from Coinbase (saving ~3.5% fees)
- Send ETH to Metamask wallet
- Swap ETH for tGBP on Uniswap
- Send tGBP to Celsius
So actually, it’s only 5 steps and once you’ve done it once or twice, it will be a doddle and take less than 10 minutes. For 10.51% interest rate, I’ll take that over keeping my GBP in 0.01% interest rate savings account any day! Happy to help out in the comments if you need.
My plan is probably to factor in tGBP now and add this to the compound interest effect but if you’re in the UK (or even if you’re not) and this is of interest but you’re not on Celsius, be sure to use the referral link below to help you get started.
So, do you think you’ll look in to Celsius or other CeFi options? Have you already got involved with these tokens and making the most of these unreal interest rates? Let me know in the comments below!
Take care
Nicky
Referral link for Celsius
- Sign up with the invite link
- Deposit and buy $200 worth of BTC
- We both get $20 of BTC
