NEXO is the native token of Nexo, a centralised crypto lending and wealth platform that has spent seven years lending against crypto collateral, running a yield-bearing Earn product, and issuing a crypto-backed debit card — all while collecting regulatory bruises in roughly equal measure to users.
What it does
Nexo was founded in 2018 by Antoni Trenchev, Kalin Metodiev and Georgi Shulev, veterans of Bulgarian consumer lender Credissimo. The platform lets holders borrow against BTC, ETH and other collateral without selling it, earn interest on deposits, and spend via a Nexo Card.
NEXO itself is a loyalty and utility token: staking or holding it bumps users up a Base–Silver–Gold–Platinum tier ladder that unlocks lower loan rates, higher Earn yields and better card cashback. Nexo also runs a discretionary buy-back-and-burn programme, funnelling a slice of platform revenue into open-market NEXO purchases, which is the closest thing the token has to a value-accrual mechanism tied to usage rather than pure speculation.
Risks
Nexo's history is inseparable from its regulatory record. In January 2023 it paid $45 million to settle SEC and US state charges over its unregistered Earn Interest Product and pulled that product from American users entirely. The same month, Bulgarian prosecutors and an anti-mafia unit raided Nexo's Sofia offices over money-laundering and tax allegations; the case was closed for lack of evidence roughly a year later, but the reputational dent lingered.
Nexo has since picked up a MiCA licence in the EU and announced a return to the US market in 2025 as the political mood shifted, though its core lending business remains custodial — user funds sit with Nexo, not in a non-custodial smart contract, which is precisely the model that sank Celsius and BlockFi in 2022. That single-counterparty risk, not smart-contract exploits, is the thing to weigh before trusting NEXO's loyalty perks over a self-custodied alternative.