Is Salt Lending Dead, Or Just Asleep at the Wheel?

The cryptocurrency project Salt Lending appears to have disappeared. While it’s website is still running, all of its social media channels have gone mysteriously silent for weeks or months. The last Facebook post appeared on May 1, the last Telegram announcement was also on May 1, and the last Tweet was on May 17, almost 3 weeks ago. Token prices have also been steadily dropping. What’s going on with Salt Lending?

What is Salt Lending?

Salt Lending appeared and came into prominence in 2017. The project quickly gained popularity with its promise to offer cryptocurrency backed cash loans. Their tagline was “keep your crypto, get your cash”. Basically speaking, one could put up their cryptocurrency as collateral and receive a low interest loan that could be repaid with either dollars or SALT tokens at a rate of $27.50 per token. The company issued a number of loans but it was quickly revealed that the majority of US states (where loans were initially available) were not able to apply for loans of any kind.

For more information on Salt and its background, check out our article on the project here.

Salt on the Decline

After hitting an all-time high in late December of around $16 each, SALT tokens have seen a steady decline and are now sitting at a pre-ICO price of just $1.98 each. This decline has been steady and the trend does not appear to be reversing.

Many Salt investors believed that the eventual price of each SALT token would approach the value of each token on the Salt platform itself, or $27.50. The reason for this is because one could theoretically take out a loan using bitcoin as collateral, and then fully repay the loan in SALT tokens at the platform rate. This means you could effectively buy SALT tokens and sell them back to the platform at the price of $27.50 each. To many this seemed like free money, but of course there had to be a catch.

That catch was later revealed when Salt claimed that their loans could not be repaid early and must be repaid on a payment schedule. Second, all loans needed to be held for a number of years at a minimum, and interest rates for their loans were not particularly competitive. This meant that the apparent gain of using SALT tokens as a loan repayment mechanism largely evaporated.

As the company has effectively stopped communicating, we do not know if they are still issuing loans at all to anyone even in eligible states.

No comment

We reached out to Salt a few days ago to ask them if the company is still functioning and why all their social media channels have gone silent. We got a response surprisingly quickly, but it simply told us to contact a different address. This was odd as their customer service rep could have easily just said yes “we are still operating” instead of referring us to contact someone else. We attempted to contact this secondary address but have so far not received a reply.

If Salt Lending does reach out to us after this article is published, we will include that as an update. But if they are still operating as normal, why are they refusing to stay in touch with their community? Posting a Tweet, Facebook update, or Telegram announcement is not particularly difficult. And the fact that they have gone silent for such a long time is even more confusing.

The Last Salt action

The last social media post made was on their Twitter account was on May 17. The Tweet was in regards to a billboard advertisement in Times Square that the company apparently made. In our opinion, however, the advertisement was pretty lousy. It simply says “from crypto to this dough” and has a very small barely legible Salt logo at the bottom right.

Take a selfie with our digital billboard in Times Square (1500 broadway & 43rd) using hashtags #saltlendingco & #sweepstakes to be entered to win a tropical getaway! Every 10 retweets counts for another entry! (Must submit tweet by Sunday 5/20/2018 to be eligible to win) pic.twitter.com/BeDEDaWLlf

— SALT (@SALTLending) May 17, 2018

The responses to the post include a number of “free eth” giveaway scams that were not deleted (highly suggesting that no one is watching). The only comment that the official Salt Lending account has made was a response to a single person on June 1 saying that a winner for their “take a selfie” competition will be announced soon.

Is Salt Dead, or Just Sleeping?

It’s very unusual for a cryptocurrency company or project to simply go silent on all fronts for weeks or months at a time. Even the official Salt sub-Reddit hasn’t had a single post in months. The company has also not written a blog post on its Medium page since early April.

It’s very unwise for Salt to go silent for a number of reasons, but also because their competitors like Celsius Network and Nexo are quickly picking up speed and gaining thousands of followers.

So at this point, we’re not able to say for certain if Salt is defunct or just simply abandoning all communication with the public, which is a very strange thing to do. If Salt reaches out to us with any further information about their status, will update this article accordingly.

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