Tether (USDT) is making a $10 million equity investment in the Celsius Network (CEL) crypto-currency lending platform with a pre-money valuation of $120 million, bringing the post-money valuation to $150 million.

The company has raised $30 million in its first round of capital. In 2018, Celsius completed a $50 million ICO. Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky told Cointelegraph that his company has continued its policy of not raising funds from venture capital.

Celsius Network sells two-thirds of its $15 million stock offering on day one

Investors will have no say
Mashinsky also pointed out that the capital sold in this round does not come with voting rights. This ensures that investors will not be able to force the company to change its core mission of sharing 80% of profits with the community. He believes this is what sets Celsius apart from the competition:

„I think they [BlockFi] raised something like $20 million, at $30 million before [the valuation of the money]. Then they donated more than half. Now they’re raising another $30 [million] at $60 [million in pre-money valuation]. Basically, the founders own a very small percentage of the company, maybe 10% or less. And here we intentionally don’t give any of the investors a vote. So I’m still the largest shareholder and then we have control of the company. Very important for us so that the investors are not going to change: we give 80% back to the community. So I wanted to make sure that nobody came in and said ‚Hey, you’re making a profit, so why don’t you take it yourself or why don’t you pay the dividends?

Tether is not a toxic investor

Tether explains why he hasn’t burned any USDT
Mashinsky doesn’t think Bitcoin Champion is a toxic investor. In his opinion, the market is the best judge and since all the lawsuits have been filed against the company, the market capitalization of USDT has increased nine-fold:

„If you look at what the tokenization was when the lawsuits were filed and what it is now, it increased nine times, it was $1 billion, now it’s $9 billion. If there were any concerns about not trusting Tether, investors wouldn’t be [investing].

Better than competition

The Celsius CEO also says that Tether, being such a dominant player, choosing his company for a strategic investment over his competition is an important endorsement:

„The important thing is that Tether has nine billion dollars worth of tokenized dollars. That’s 90% of all the stable currencies that exist. The fact that they chose Celsius is very important, because obviously they could have worked with anyone, they could have chosen BlockFi or Nexo, or anyone.

Bloomberg: „It’s only a matter of time before Tether takes Ether out of second place in the market.
On the question of why Celsius is raising funds only two years after the successful ICO, he explained that the injection of additional capital is necessary if the company is to achieve its ambitious goals:

„First you raise money when you can, not when you need it. And it was important that we have other strategic investors coming in. Tether is not the only one, we have several partnerships. We want to see several billion dollars in assets, we want to have one billion gold, several billion Bitcoin. These things require a lot of capital to grow the platform.

Mashinsky also hinted that in the coming months, Celsius will be „bringing together all the services that Tether and Bitfinex offer.

Cointelegraph contacted Tether for comments, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

The virtual reality media platform, Sensorium, has announced its membership in the Global Blockchain Business Council, or GBBC, a non-profit industry association based in Switzerland for blockchains.

Sensorium will participate in GBBC’s upcoming virtual forum on May 28, where the firm’s chief technology officer, Alex Blagirev, will discuss his predictions on how social virtual media will change the way people interact online.

Cointelegraph spoke with GBBC to discuss the intersection between social media and virtual reality, or VR, and the role the blockbuster plays in the future of the industry.

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DLT protects the copyright of user content
A GBBC representative stated that the convergence of VR and social media is already beginning to gain momentum, noting that major platforms such as Facebook „are providing users with new ways to share and experience content“.

„In this context, blockchain technology is likely to play an important role in the creation of digital assets and an online virtual economy,“ said the representative.

„In addition, blockchain technology could be used to protect property and copyright, as well as to create new advertising models in virtual worlds, as is already being done in the real world.

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Blockchain can eliminate social media identity theft
Sensorium’s director of operations, Brian Kean, emphasized the security benefits offered by distributed logbook technology, or DLT, stating

Identity theft, false accounts, etc. will be largely eliminated as human participants in the social-virtual world must verify their identity through blockchain.

Kean also revealed that the

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3. both bitcoin and ether
4. ban on anonymous trading
5. the publication of the documents
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will also be used to „facilitate payment for content created by third parties.