Nexo Booster

The Nexo Booster offers a quick and user-friendly way to execute leveraged crypto purchases on the Nexo Exchange with up to $250,000 per single booster transaction – with no limit on the number of transactions you could make.

In effect, Nexo uses your existing crypto holdings, or such converted into your selected “Receive currency”, plus the newly-acquired asset as collateral to give a crypto-backed credit to finance the acquisition.

You can execute a booster using a single asset or different assets.

Boosts with a single asset
Boost a cryptocurrency from 1.25x to 3x its value and receive the boosted equivalent in the same asset. Example: Boost BTC and get more BTC.

Boosts with two assets
Boost a cryptocurrency from 1.25x to 3x its value and receive the boosted equivalent in another cryptocurrency. Example: Boost BTC to get ETH.

The whole Booster flow is intuitive and user-friendly. All you have to do to boost your assets is:

1. Open the Nexo app, click on the Exchange tab and choose the ‘Booster’ option.
2. Select the currency you want to leverage against, the leverage percentage (from 1.25x up to 3x) and the asset you want to acquire.
3. Click on “Profit Projection” – a handy tool that lets you see your potential earnings by projecting possible price movements of your boosted asset.
4. Tap “Exchange” and you’re done. The newly-acquired assets will be added to your Credit Line Wallet as collateral for your booster transaction.
5. Once you repay the outstanding crypto credit, you get to retain the difference between the sale price of the assets you borrowed and your original investment.

Note: You can use crypto, stablecoins, USDx, EURx, and GBPx for the “Pay with” currency, but you cannot select any fiat or stablecoins for your “Receive” currency. The NEXO Token is excluded from the Nexo Booster altogether – you cannot pay with or receive NEXO.

Fees for the Nexo Booster are factored into your outstanding credit and constitute a percentage of the value of the additional assets we purchase in your name. There are three different fee tiers based on the LTV of your booster transaction:

- Up to 50% LTV: 1% Booster fee
- 50-60% LTV: 2% Booster fee
- 60-70% LTV: 3% Booster fee

The Booster LTV is calculated as the ratio between your outstanding credit and the value of the collateral used for the transaction.

Keep in mind that you can use the Nexo Booster even if your Credit Line LTV is above 70% – for example if you've taken out a crypto credit in stablecoins with 90% LTV.

Example

Let's say you want to boost $1,000 worth of Ethereum and you want to purchase more ETH. This is a single asset boost but the same principles from this example apply to dual asset boosts with the difference that the asset you receive will be different than the one you start off with and there is one extra exchange transaction in the background of your boost.

In this example, let’s say you want to boost your 1,000 USD worth of ETH to the factor of 2. Here’s a breakdown of what you’d get after finalizing your boost:

- Initial assets: $1,000 in ETH
- Outstanding credit: $1019.99 (the extra $1,000 for the 2x boost, plus a 2% fee)
- Loan-to-value: ~ 51%
- Assets Collateralized from the Boost: $2,000 in ETH

So post-boosting, you end up with $2,000 in Ethereum collateralized in your Credit Line Wallet and a credit of $1019.99 to pay off – this last sum is what you’ll accrue interest on. You can then repay the credit once ETH reaches your price target and benefit from the price growth.

Note: Needless to say, the market never moves in a single direction. Similarly, as a leverage product, the Nexo Booster can work in both ways – it amplifies your gains when the chosen asset appreciates, yet magnifies the losses when prices fall. In order to make an educated decision, you need to have a thorough understanding of how the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio and price-based margin calls and liquidations work. For further details visit our Help Center.

The main difference is in the number of manual actions you’ll have to make, the execution time, and, most importantly, the leverage ratio.

Technically, if you wanted to, you could leverage yourself up to 2x by repeatedly borrowing against crypto with Nexo’s Instant Crypto Credit Lines, purchasing more crypto with the borrowed funds, collateralizing those assets, and then using the credit against them to buy more coins, repeating the process numerous times.

Rather than just 2x, the Nexo Booster allows you to leverage up to 3x in one instant transaction – eliminating the need for countless manual credit requests and swaps from stablecoins to crypto. This saves you time and also guarantees less price fluctuation for acquiring assets through leverage.

Another key difference between the Booster and our credit line functionality comes from the maximum permitted LTV. Every asset you can use as collateral for Nexo’s Instant Crypto Credit Lines has a maximum LTV. For BTC and ETH, it can be as high as 50%, but for other assets, it’s lower. For example, Polkadot has a maximum LTV of 30%. The Nexo Booster, however, has one permitted LTV of 70% – for all the cryptocurrencies we offer. This way you can borrow more against currencies that otherwise have a lower available LTV.

Since the assets from the Nexo Booster are collateralized in a Nexo credit line, the outstanding amount accrues interest just like any other credit on our platform. Your APR depends on your Loyalty tier and can be as low as 0% if you’re a Platinum user and your LTV is below or equal to 20%.

You also get charged a one-off Booster fee that can range from 1-3% and depends on the LTV of your booster transaction:

- Up to 50% LTV: 1% Booster fee
- 50-60% LTV: 2% Booster fee
- 60-70% LTV: 3% Booster fee

The Booster LTV is calculated as the ratio between your outstanding credit and the value of the collateral used for the transaction.

Note: If you have a pre-existing credit line, you will accrue interest on the total amount of your previous credit and booster credit together.

If you’re already borrowing using our Instant Crypto Credit Lines, nothing impedes you from using the Nexo Booster. There are only two differences:

1. First, your pre-existing loan-to-value ratio will merge with the LTV from your booster transaction into a single LTV marker. Whether the new ratio will be higher or lower depends on the size of your previous outstanding credit and what its current LTV is.

2. Secondly, you will accrue interest on the total sum borrowed for your booster-acquired assets and your pre-existing crypto credit.

Let’s consider the two possible scenarios – if the price of your collateral appreciates or depreciates.

Having an open boosted position while your crypto’s price goes up

First of all, if this happens – congratulations! Depending on how much the value of the collateral from your booster transaction has gone up, you may be thinking about taking profits and closing your position.

In this case, all you have to do is repay your outstanding credit – you can do this with assets from your Savings Wallet, or by ordering Nexo to repay the crypto credit with part of your collateral. With your assets appreciating in value, this will only be a portion of your booster-acquired crypto, the rest is your profit.

Having an open boosted position while your crypto’s price goes down

As with any leveraged position, if the value of your coins drops, you’re exposed to potential losses. What essentially happens is you still owe Nexo the same amount you borrowed, but your collateral is losing value – meaning your loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is increasing.

You will receive a minimum of three margin calls (via SMS and email) when the LTV increases to 71.4%, 74.1%, and 76.9%. If the value of your collateral continues to drop and your LTV reaches the 83.33% mark, the Nexo blockchain oracle may initiate partial automatic repayments to rebalance the loan-to-value ratio back within limits. The blockchain oracle will sell as little as possible, so you retain as much of your crypto as possible.

To avoid this scenario, top up more assets and enable our Automatic Collateral Transfer feature, allowing the Nexo blockchain oracle to automatically transfer a small portion of your assets from the Savings Wallet to the Credit Line Wallet, thus keeping your credit line health in check.

To sell the crypto you received through a booster transaction, you will first have to repay your outstanding credit. You can do this by tapping the “Repay” button on your Dashboard.

If you didn’t have an open credit line before you used the Nexo Booster, you would have to repay all your credit to make all the assets from your boost available for selling.

If you had outstanding credit before using the Booster, you only have to repay the amount that was used for your boost, plus any accrued interest to free up those assets.

Of course, our Instant Crypto Credit Lines are super flexible, so you can pay off parts of your outstanding credit and unlock your booster assets in parts as is most convenient for you.