AMA with @MelGelderman from @monolith_web3

Transcript

if you are looking for the front page of defy look no further than xerion.io xerion is your home base for managing your d5 portfolios xerion offers a central place for you to engage with all of the d5 protocols and assets that you engage with on a daily basis but all in one central spot here you can see i've loaded up a wallet and xerion is giving me the portfolio performance of all the assets in this wallet over time as well as a breakdown of all the assets that i own as well as all of my transaction history that i've ever done in an easy to view fashion xerion also lets you invest right into d5's best yielding financial opportunities right from their home page xerion also makes

it super easy to access interest in defy using applications like compound and ave in the background and you can also exchange your assets using the xerion app using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates you can even use the xerion mobile wallet to add your metamask or arjun or another ethereum address right into your mobile wallet so you can see your portfolio and engage in defy on the go here i just loaded up my argent wallet and now i'm going to load up my metamask as well and xericon will do the same thing it will add all of my assets and wallets together all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on adding wallets is trivially easy if you already have a metamask you can get it

right into the xerion app and it can sync with your desktop app as well and the best part is you can also buy ether right into the app itself use the invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in as well as other opportunities and coming soon to the xerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well so download the app it works on ios and android go to xerion.io plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you we're also brought to you by monolith monolith is your cool new defy account your defy savings account your defy

checking account except the cool thing about the monolith defy account is that it gets software updates right you actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time so here are some of the features monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know defy and what it is you can you can add money to it you can put that money to work uh in compound and accessing yield uh but you can and you can also swap through uniswap what was cool with monolith is that they will send you a very sexy monolith visa card that connects to your smart monolith smart contract wallet on ethereum so it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a a savings account that gets software updates so this is

something that you're never going to find out in the real world but you can still do real world things with you know real money and like buy your groceries so that's just fantastic coming soon to monolith actually already here to monolith is now you can buy die and get it sent to your wallet directly right so it's also being an on-ramp so you don't have to go through your centralized exchange like coinbase or gemini or wherever you can just go straight from your bank account right into your monolith checking account smart contract wallet so check them out at monolith.xyz hey bankless nation welcome to another bankless community ama super excited to bring this to you on a thursday as usual

these amas get released on our youtube live and then you can also hear them on the podcast there are two ways of tapping into this and if you want to ask a question you can go to youtube right now get your question in the chat box either myself or david will field that question as it comes up in our conversation with mel gelderman mel is the ceo of what we call a bankless visa card the ceo of monolith we've been wanting to do this conversation for a really long time mel how are you doing today good ryan thank you thank you both david and ryan for uh for having me on cheers i've always been very

sorry thanks for being here yeah yeah i've i've always been delighted um to be able to like sponsor your whole operation so or at least the podcast so yeah thank you for having me well it's fantastic um you know david and i are very like selective in terms of the um the products and uh like the the sorts of tools that we put on the podcast in front of our listeners so it's gotta fit the thesis it's gotta fit the thesis it's got it's gotta be products that we love use ourselves um we can't quite use monolith yet because unfortunately for us we are us-based but hopefully we could talk about that but mel i think some folks

might not know what monolith is i was wondering if you could give us an overview of what the monolith visa card is and some of the other stuff that you guys have put together for the d5 bankless uh crypto community who who want to live a bit more self-sovereign want to live on that frontier that we're always talking about without having all of their funds and assets controlled by the banks so what do you guys bring to the table here at monolith yeah so um i think fundamentally the premise that monolith is building on is the idea that there was going to be one day this

ethereum economy right this um this you know parallel financial system that would emerge on top of ethereum and um and we're actually seeing that right the last two years that has actually started to come to fruition right more and more quickly by the day and um what we wanted to do for that what we decided to do a few years ago was to try and build um a functional equivalent product um to what what everyone in the world currently uses today which is a bank account say and but instead um the financial services that we're that we're providing are powered by the ethereum economy what

we today called d fight which is a much more catchy term um i always regret not coming up with the term bankless ourselves but what we are trying to do is um we are allowing trying to allow people to live essentially a bankless life that doesn't um have to change the the user's habits right like that they can't pay in the shop anymore say and do and receive receive their salary anymore right because the reality is although there's probably you know optimistically like a hundred thousand or so people who actually used ephi to some degree or other in the world today maybe that's too much um

the reality is the rest of the world for years to come will still be entrenched in this massive old financial system that exists today and therefore um we have to build a product that tries to incorporates that all world into this new thriving but fledgling defy economy and and then allow that to just yeah like harmoniously work together right and that is what monitors so so very practically that means that we have enough sodium wallets and a d5 wallet and um we are attaching to that more conventional financial services right so most notably obviously we have a visa

debit card right and um we're indeed live in the european union and the uk which is about to leave the eu blah blah um that's where we're live today but um yeah we we and this is just the the um birth ground is this like this is just like the age-old crypto dream of being able to go to starbucks and buy your coffee essentially without fiat without a bank if you so choose in a self-sovereign way right like i feel like crypto's talked about this dream since 2012 and 2013 and you guys are actually pulling it off because

you know it's one thing to have a uh a visa card in crypto right like a coin base can do this there are other crypto banks that that do this but to do it all non-custodially from a smart contract wallet that sir is truly bankless uh and well done for bringing the the crypto dream to fruition i i feel like that's like did that motivate you guys is it do you always want to basically be able to use crypto in a practical way and is that the reason it is so funny it's so funny that you mentioned that because that's completely right this is how it started so back in as you state the you know the like the early days of crypto

when bitcoin first emerged 2013 um i was so in love with bitcoin it was the best thing i'd ever seen right it was so anti-establishment it was it was it was the most outrageous technology that i knew of at the time and um i was so obsessed with it i basically ditched all my bank accounts canceled all my bank accounts and decided to only live with bitcoin and um i started to travel around i quit university and started to travel around and that was a really hard life living with just bitcoin back then right so i would literally there was this map back then and i'd have to use like a mycelium right like peer-to-peer i'd have to

physically meet people in p in person who would give me taiwan dollars and i would give them some bitcoin right and it felt like this really dodgy deal but that's what it was like back then and um and and why i believed that was so important to me is because i wanted to just put my money where my mouth was right like i believed that with bitcoin originally we were starting to see um this new zeitgeist emerged this new phase of society right the start of that um i wanted to live that right like there were so many people in our industry back then who were just talking about it when i was actually doing it right no one was using bitcoin day today and and i wanted to do that but the

reality was it's next to impossible right like you're only going to do that if you're absolutely obsessed with this stuff for any normal person that's just not a way to live and the reality is that adoption of crypto directly has not really taken off yet even since then right and it's not something that is going to happen anytime soon either um and um and therefore it just makes most sense to incorporate the very best of the old world which basically is you know the payment networks among among other things and just incorporate that into um you know our our crypto experience right

um and that is indeed how originally it started um yeah well that's a fantastic story mel and you clearly have a ton of energy and excitement and passion which is exactly what you need uh to to really build out something fantastic in the crypto space so tip of the hat for for all of that you definitely have the right and the right vision i i want to get to the topic of like this like you talked about moving into this new world this new phase of of humanity which is something that we see in the in something we talk about on the bankless podcast all the time we also talk about the friction between a new world and an old world and this seems to be the um what monolith as a company is really targeting as a problem

right like we have this old world and we have this new world and there's a disconnect between those and monolith tries to bridge that disconnect by offering a smart contract wallet where you can hold your assets and then a visa card where you can use it in the old world but that br i would imagine building that bridge is pretty difficult can you kind of describe how that bridge is constructed and how a visa card comes to be connected to a smart contract wallet on ethereum yeah yeah um indeed it's not easy um we have to you know like if you compare us to the a lot of crit like

uh crypto wallets that exist today or d5 wallets um that exists in our space today a lot of them don't really have to deal with the real world basically they can operate entirely within the you know within the d5 space and the you know the cloud realm we can't do that we have to operate within the you know the established financial world simply because we have we want to offer those services right and so that means that we have to offer we have to do aml we have to follow all the aml anti-money laundry uh roles and regulations in in the eu and we have to do kyc on users and this is you know to appease the regulator but

also to make sure that visa is confident that we are not you know laundering money right or like for for users right um i think um yeah those are those are pretty significant challenges um because in effect what we have built we haven't just built an ethereum wallet right a contract wallets we've also built a complete um like challenge your bank right um forget the bank part specifically we're not a bank but um like legally we're not the bank we don't hold use deposits but um we have had to build the same as you know in europe we have revoluth and we

have monza and we have n26 we've had to build all of that stuff as well and that's something that um you know other ethereum wallets haven't necessarily had to do so yeah it's an incredible amount of work and um it's pretty amazing that we've actually pulled it off to be honest so yeah when you swipe your visa card how how does dye or any other asset if there are other assets uh how does that come to be a transaction on ethereum yeah so we have um we have um currently the way our system works is that are used as a top-up so in our experience a user goes to their card

screen they can press the top up button and then they can choose from a list of erc20 tokens that are supported for top up and which one they want to basically convert into fiat to put on the card itself right um this is how a user transitions from funds in their contract wallets in their own control to having funds on their visa debit card um there's a very direct uh action that the user has to take they physically are sending a transaction from their own control into effectively you know like a back-end service that we run which will top up their card with the with that amount in in pounds or

euro equivalents and that they can then you know assuming the it takes 15 seconds to confirm that transaction within 15 seconds these will have you know money on their card um we are able to transition to a more direct model um where the user doesn't have to do the top-up um but that is until quite recently that hasn't really been allowed by the powers that be because um visa for example wants to keep quite a strong distinction between you know the crypto network and their network they don't like when when people get the impression that visa

supports ethereum directly right so um but this is starting to change um and we have that option now so um and we do want to reduce friction um so we we probably will end up doing that is there is there an oracle that's involved with that transaction or if you say say you have some like perhaps some niche erc 20 token that has a relatively low market cap low liquidity but it's supported on monolith because you guys are awesome you guys you guys support a bunch of stuff uh how do you guys actually come to know how much fiat to deposit into the monolith uh fiat into the card as a result of that transaction where where does that information come from yeah i think we are um

hooked up to most large um well in some cases on chain oracles like honestly like we're we have data feeds from price feeds from most large um sources so coin gecko and chain link um and coin market cap but coin market cap sometimes doesn't support all of them um yeah we have a like lots of price sources um yeah and perfect um for the most part um especially for stable coins we are adamant on making sure that the price the user is getting is actually the price of the token itself um

because yeah if we want this ultimately to be this platform that can replace um users bank accounts today then there can't be these additional fees that don't exist today right we can't have a service that kind of like takes a step back so um we we pretty much we are genuinely the cheapest place to use and use your crypto honestly okay so i i want to to we can tie a boa off of like the mechanisms of how money gets into the visa card and i want to tie that off but by like defining what parts are trustless and non-custodial and what parts are custodial so it sounds like that the product that monolith offers is that it allows a user a pretty

strong amount of flexibility with how much trust they want to have in a third-party institution right and so the monolith smart contract wallet seems to be the non-custodial trustless part of the equation and then the flexibility of being able to top up your monolith visa cards like when you put 500 into your monolith visa card that becomes the trusted part of the equation and the what's really compelling to me is that a a user gets to measure how much they put in their visa cards like well i only want to put in 50 today or i want to i want to load it up with you know 500 a thousand dollars and that having that flexibility is really valuable and there's no other way to do this like how else do you get integrated with the visa network without having a a trusted uh third party to get inv to

connect you to the network what is the network except a trusted third party is that is that like the right way to view these things that's completely correct um the additional benefit that doing it this way has is that the user can choose when they are effectively topping up their card for so for what price right so let's say the price of each is really high tonight um they can choose it they could choose up they can choose to top up like a thousand pounds worth of eats now rather than at the point of sale which may not be the right price for them right right so you you could you as an ether owning individual maybe i'm walking to my local coffee shop and then i realized like oh snap i actually don't have any money in my visa card my monolith visa card i can

just throw it right in there and by the time i get to the coffee shop that visa card is ready to go so that that feels pretty damn like self-sovereign and and empowering to me yeah i mean it's still um you know like um this is currently the most trustless attempt in the world of creating you know this this type of system right and i think people can get really caught up in the the theoretical black and whiteness of of a discussion like this but you know obviously we want to get to this most trustless destination um but this is just where we are now and we're always

moving further towards that yeah you guys seem to really emphasize the user always has the choice and if that is true then that is that is what we want yeah you know what's really interesting about this mail is uh you're talking uh earlier about how getting this all up has been difficult like it's you didn't take shortcuts in terms of setting up this infrastructure right but i'm also struck by um how that approach is kind of like a long-term approach here because um like you talked about monolith being almost like a d5 bank right so now that you have the visa bridge you have it one location right now you can of course expand that to other locations fingers

crossed us we'll get to it um but also the smart contract piece right it the wallet piece where where a user might keep most of their funds that is essentially the most valuable bank account any sovereign individual has ever had i tweeted this out recently like my ether account is a hundred x better than my wells fargo account in terms of raw power like super powers it gives me and every single day my ether account my ether wallet that address becomes more and more valuable why because there are thousands soon to be hundreds of thousands of people

developing money legos d5 protocols to make my ethereum bank account even better right so like software now the it's software updates now that you have this smart contract infrastructure right where that that's keeping a user funds you have access to suddenly every single erc20 asset that gets put on the ethereum blockchain not only that but you have all of the other protocols the ability to do trades maybe in the future right from that account the ability to deposit uh some of those funds into a compound or an ave like get a loan lend them out whatever is built on defy becomes part of the monolith wallet that seems to me is

like that's the best way to do this whole thing right because you're tapping into defy can you tell us a little bit about maybe that side of things on the smart contract wallet side while your money is sitting idle what sorts of things can a a user deposit them in today and then what do you have in store for the future here um i look i think you're completely correct so the fundamental premise here is that unlike say a challenger bank um like a revolut um we don't have to build all of the financial services ourselves instead we benefit from probably some of the

most bright people in the world who are currently you know engaged in building this totally new financial system and and our users as long as our platform is set up for this our users stand to benefit incredibly uh from this so and it's a lot bigger than than crypto right so um you know if during the last big bubble in 2017 um 2017-18 crypto was interesting to crypt crypto is in like old-school crypto was interesting to say [Music] 100 million people at most in the world

um like you know they're captured mostly by coinbase and you know probably 50 million by all the other exchanges combined um what dfi is doing is is potentially you know most of these people are interested in crypto were young adrenaline seeking males right um whereas what's happening in d5 today is that um rather than it just being you know all of this basically speculation it's going to be about financial services that basically everyone has need for so it's not going to be that this is interesting for just 100 million people this will be interesting for you know potentially a billion or more people um

and i think that ultimately that is is where monolith is trying to go right so the question that has really started to emerge in the last probably year or so it's become more apparent is that as d phi is accelerating um how what will be the way that regular people will really interact with dfi that's still a huge question and um you know originally the thesis was that um perhaps people would interact with contracts directly right

that um you know that that someone would have to gain the knowledge of understanding what a compound or an rv is and you know interact with these contracts directly um this works for people like all of us right people who are listening to this podcast um but the reality is that already today the pace of innovation in our space is so large it's it's literally going exponential that um it is there there will be a moment where where no one not even the most bankless of us uh will be able to keep up with what's going on and and therefore um chances are

the way you know a normal person will interact with d5 in the future will actually be through several layers of abstraction right so um and what i'm trying to say is um what monolith the the path that monitors gone down today is that um we have built this um you know without my compliance officer losing his mind um we've built this you know functional equivalent to a bank accounts um for the defy crowd for people like yourselves and the listeners um but um we will have to evolve our products further

um there is a second chapter here that we will be that we're embarking on and to make that work for everyone else because um the reality of deep fly today as much as we love it and it's fledgling is that it is only serving the d5 elite there is not a single person outside of the d5 elites or justify in general the community that is actually benefiting from defect today and um and that's because we you know and therefore this is the the piece of work that we want to try and go down you know just to give a practical example of that if i go

to my mother um and you know like to her choosing between 20 different dollar tokens doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense and 20 different dollar tokens is today tomorrow it'll be 10 you know like a thousand right um and therefore what we think um at least where we're going is we want to build this tailored curated and safe experience that still maintains all of the properties that we love about defy but that does allow a normal person who doesn't want to stick all of their time into understanding all of this because most people don't want to right um

they just want to get on with their life um we but we do want them to be able to access the benefits of defy and that's what like ultimately we're focused on right now um because we think that within five years there won't be you know like chances are there will be an experience of money that is so much better than what you can get in the conventional financial world today that hordes of people are migrating to it right that there will literally be you know probably by the end of the decade for sure there'll be a billion people using d5 chances are that's going to happen within the next five years as well and we want to make sure that we're the company doing their homework to try

and figure out um what that's going to look like i always think it's funny the the people going bankless right now in d5 right they're looking at things on ether scan that's almost like looking at the the firmware level of your computer it's almost like uh you know how often do you open up command line on your mac os and like type in some commands i mean i'm using the user interface 99 of the time and so are 99 of people who have max so we are just operating at this very firmwell where command line level right now when we see things in ether scanner we're using an obvi interface but to see what's going to be built on top of this like at the user interface level the operating system level that's

where mainstream starts coming around david we should probably uh jump on a couple of questions that are coming because they're coming in hot yeah we got a question from from james from the youtube which actually fits right into this conversation until i'll give it a little bit of a preface mel you talked about like building out a product for the legacy world right and i think if they come on to this monolith smart contract wallet visa card or any other company that is tackling problems like you guys are going to expect some certain features right and and one of them might be like uh spending limits right like spending limits on your card or like what happens if somebody loses their visa card can you can they just go and start swiping until it just gets drained like what are some of the the

legacy features that you one would expect to find in a bank account that they also find on their monolith smart contract wallet yeah so um we have today implemented um the the features that you would kind of expect from a very modern card experience right so if you indeed lose your card within the app um you can immediately freeze your card or block your card even you can also unfreeze it in case you find it again um and yeah you can replace it so um and if you hit the replace button within you know well on average three to five days you'll get anyone in the mail um yeah and then also what about the ability to auto pull from your wallet

into your card so maybe you have zero dollars on your card but you swipe it anyways and it defaults to a specific token or maybe ether itself and it swaps it right then and there is that a feature that's coming um i that is a great feature suggestion um it's so the the thing is that would require the phone to create a transaction on behalf of the user sending funds from the contract wallets from their own control into the top-up service for the card and currently we're not doing that and because we want the user to basically feel like they have control and authority over that

what instead we can do um is that um we will send you a notification that the moment you know your balance on your card goes below let's say 200 euros or something um it's telling you hey you may want to top option right um yeah bell this is a question coming in on discord from a bankless member gabor um he is or g i'm not sure is asking the question if you've had discussions with banks on your technology and i think the more specific question is this he makes a comment it should be appealing to them in particular jurisdictions where they're not permitted by regulators to offer custodial services so could there be

some idea of monolith offering banks like these some kind of a white label type of solution where they get access to the smart contract wallet and the the monolith card and it's like you know um city monolith by citibank and onboarding onboarding customers from banks into this bankless world any any thoughts on that um i'm afraid i only half understand the question what what he's he or she is saying um that um some banks just wondering old custody if there's a way for you to partner with banks in any way who are sort of afraid to enter this whole d5 space

and you kind of solve that problem basically yeah yeah um i guess i think look the the problem with running a company like ours is or the curse of running a company like monolith is there are so many possibilities there are so many avenues that we can go down and our space is so exciting that you know we could change direction almost every month um the thing i think um i want to do most with our company is i just want to nail one thing and that one thing that i really want to nail

is i want to make money fun for normal people right and i think um we can do that with defy and we can make we can make this experience of money which people have never seen before that they haven't seen with you know all these challenger banks from the fintech world or anywhere else and um yeah and i think um that's what we're focused on we absolutely could go down an avenue of white labeling our products right like that definitely gets asks um and um yeah i think you know i think the other

side of this is we also are quite conservative in how we run our company so we haven't hired a massive team right um and um part of the reason for that is that we know that d5 is quite a long game right we are here um uh we want to see the day that d flight reaches a billion users but that isn't next year right um the reality is we are probably still point zero zero zero one percent of the way towards that that's the percentage of the world that currently maybe even knows what d phi is um and so um we are

you know uh we just want to um plan for what is realistically going to happen in the in the near term um i guess i i don't know if that half answers your question but that's a great question um yeah no that was fantastic mel we have a bunch of more questions that we want to get to including questions about uh the tkn token which i think made treasuries cool before they really rose into popularity in d5 summer 2020 so and we also have a bunch more user questions which we're going to get to but we got to take a break and talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible if you want to live a bankless life you

need to get a hardware wallet there is no alternative for storing your crypto in a self-sovereign fashion that's why i have four ledgers that i use to manage my different crypto assets using the ledger live account as well ledger live is like your home base for managing your ethereum defy and crypto accounts it does a really good job of aggregating all of your different ethereum wallets if you are the type of person that uses more than one but you can also add other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin or cosmos or whatever your preferred blockchain is and then it will display an aggregate portfolio of all your accounts at the main page one thing that ledger is doing a really good job of is enabling all the money verbs that me and ryan talk about

with the bankless skill cube enabled in the ledger live app so right now in the ledger live app you can buy sell lend swap and stake your crypto assets which is doing a really good job of fulfilling all of the money verbs in the bankless skill cube something that's new to ledger live is ledger swap where you can swap assets one for another directly inside the ledger live application ensuring trustlessness in your financial activity on ethereum and on bitcoin if you want to learn more about what you can do with a ledger go to the blog post the power of ledger live on the ledger website where they share some of the more advanced things that you can do with your ledger that you might not have known about there's a link in the show notes that will take you to the ledger

shop where you can get your preferred ledger hardware wallet i personally like the ledger nano x but i also have both they're both great options when you own a ledger you own your own assets in the way that they have been designed to be held by the user and the user alone so go get your ledger today to make sure that you are as self-sovereign as possible the bankless state in the nations are brought to you by wiring wiring is defy's first self-building community run project which i just get really really excited about iron is a system that seeks out yield in d5 and it does that in a number of different ways but a very aggressive way is with the vaults where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice and

different defy experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with your deposited token right and so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in d5 for those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins the urn system is for you where you can deposit your preferred stable coin and wiring will go and figure out which money market on d5 and defy is producing the best interest rate whether it's dydx it's compound or ave it looks around d5 to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically so you don't have to check them out at yearn.finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well all right guys we are back with mel from

monolith and monolith has this uh token this tkn token which the token model i've always thought was pretty fascinating and i think we've seen a lot of derivatives of that token model come out in d5 summer 2020 but tkn was kind of the og with this treasury model uh mel can you kind of explain to us uh the tkn token and its role in the monolith ecosystem yeah yeah i you're you're right when um dave and i originally designed tkn it was pretty novel not me by the way um different david yeah my co-founder um um i think um yeah what tkn currently does is upon

a user topping up their card um uh that transaction um the function that they call to top up on our uh basically our side of the contract system actually um tells the um tells the user to send a small fee uh to this uh this different place which is the the treasury basically right the the tgn treasury um and token holders um basically own what's in that right so we originally pioneered this burn function where you would have to burn your tea can um to receive your pro router part of all the funds inside this um treasury

contracts um that where that is that was the current thinking at the time that will definitely change and go away um in favor of a lot more of the you know more attractive models that have kind of been pioneered in the last year um i think overall though um where we really want to get to is um if we are planning to have a system where um we will have essentially hundreds of millions of users that are all using um that are using monolith because it is a very convenient way to get much better money than

they're used to access to much better money than the uc 3d5 we can probably charge for that right um but because we are providing a convenience to someone who has absolutely no idea what the hell you know like a a compound is right or an rv is um and um if we can work that into our token where there's effectively you know a very large use of user base that is getting benefits from d5 about that but a percentage of that is is going to the token um i think that's when we that's the place we want to be ideally um

and if we can feed that back in to the product itself where users as they are using malnuth the products um they also become co-owners of this project in a certain sense right or they're receiving tcan um that they become more invested in using this products right it's not just that oh money is better but i actually start to own this platform right you can't say that with bank of america or you know hsbc or whatever um yeah that that's pretty crazy um i mean we can do much more outrageous stuff but but this is i think that's the

like the ultimate goal yeah right okay so every time somebody swipes their visa card at the grocery store they use up some of their money and so then they need to add more money and that when they add more money when they top up that's when a small percentage of those money gets added to a treasury which you can burn a tkn token to get your fair claim on the treasury you are pro rata share is there anything does the token um is it mapped out to be a governance token where the community can actually direct the the future of monolith or right now is it mostly just a value capture token um it is mostly it today it's a value capture token um we have been

incredibly um impressed honestly by like the projects we've seen emerge right in the last year um you know rv and uh like yearn with you know like all this on-chain governance right and the level of feedback that like feedback loops that that can create um we absolutely think that um if we want to succeed in building a d5 for the masses um you know like financial interface um that we need to employ the community on the d5 side of the equation right so

um if um we can ultimately turn tk into a governance token where we're not necessarily the ones figuring out how um you like a regular person's funds should be allocated within this defy space which is always growing in complexity instead we can outsource that to the community and and create a system that rewards the you know pays the community for that um that's ideal um so yeah i hope that answers your question yeah that makes sense and it very feels much uh feels like the rei cooperative where if i have a an rei membership i go to rei i buy something there and then at

the end of the year they send me back a little cash back and dividend and so i would imagine that if you are a monolith user there's a there's an elegance into the alignment between having the token because then you're just getting cash it's like a cash back visa card you know you swipe your money via card you get a little cash back i think that's pretty cool is that is the tkn token the monolith business model or is the actual specific monolith team funded in additional ways or alternative ways or is it or is it all based on the token um i think the ideal outcome is for all stakeholders to be completely aligned and so ideally indeed we charge exclusively

through the token um because monitor is very large stakeholder in the token um and yeah it kind of creates you know a really sexy streamlined system um yeah yeah it sounds like there is probably more to come on that on the economics of that i want to get to a question we've sort of teased from from the start of this mill and it's a question we've probably had like from at least a half a dozen or so bankless members which is when north america when the united states is that on your roadmap and if so do you have any estimate on when that might be coming because we'd love to have our own

bankless visa cards yeah when can we add to the treasury yeah um i mean i wanna like first of all the users that we already get from bankless are the best users right like they they use our product the most they spend the most so um and i super appreciate indeed all of the requests from users in the us and so um the us absolutely is a a large priority on our roadmap um as for when the uh that's a little bit harder to specifically say um

i think the the biggest thing that we're trying to understand and overcome right now is the basically the regulatory um environment because it is very different than europe and we're already having like europe isn't easy um like they just rolled out aml d5 right anti-money laundry directed five and um basically every country is implementing it differently and um as it stands our compliance team is largely preoccupied with making sure that like we are completely happy within europe even um

but um yeah as soon as they can kind of figure out the the uh how we would do this handle this in in america we are commercially we are we know exactly what we want to do and we're basically ready um we just have to kind of finalize our position on that um yeah you guys are kind of waiting on the regulators basically that's the hardest part of this whole thing right it's not like a technology limitation it's not you know distribution limitation it's just regulators yeah it's it is um it's a big project right like um we would we probably will

have to end up hiring um a team in the us um just for compliance reasons alone um and yeah like we're we're we're approaching that stage but not quite yet um but yeah like bank list will be the first place where we can announce it well we we cannot wait and you know another thing i i love to see is and this is a question that that came in from i think a bunch of bankless folks uh actually even coming into this is uh can you talk about your design because people get these monolith cards in the mail and it's a pretty unique experience experience it's not like receiving a you know a typical

um debit card visa card from from your local bank or from like you know capital one here in the us it is like branded it is packaged in such a unique way can you tell us that the history of of your branding and packaging and um like what like just just tell us about the art here it's super cool yeah yeah um i mean this is just me being completely crazy basically um i think i think it all stems from what ethereum really is doing for the world right so um you know like

back in the day when david and i my co-founder david um first met we met in taiwan and we were we'd we'd you know we were partying a lot and talking about ethereum all night and um around the time we'd watch this movie 2001 space odyssey right which a lot of you probably haven't um watched because it's very old it's very ultra from 1968 or 69 stanley kubrick movie but in it there's this um big there's this big black stone that appears every time humanity is transitioning from one stage from one epic to the next right

um you know like when in the beginning of the movie famously you see basically these these these monkeys right these apes and they see this big black mullet the stone and and that you know in the movie that's the moment they transition into like early civilization stage right and and later they go from civilization to the space age and eventually to the singularity and every time the mod is there and um back when ethereum had just launched dave and i had watched this movie and we truly believed that we were witnessing the real life equivalence to stanley kubrick's monolith in the form of ethereum right that ethereum itself

symbolizes this technology which is transcending us from our current age let's say the the post-french revolution age right into something that i would tangibly say is actually the space age right we we know only us only people in our industry and probably only people who are so deep into ethereum like like our listeners and all of us um truly can appreciate the the profound level of change that may be possible because of this god damn genius that vitalik you know was and he created ethereum right like like we you know we fundamentally if we can change the

economy we will change governance we can change all aspects of our society and we actually may not die in a nuclear fire by the end of the century right and and that is what that is ultimately the the the belief that i wanted to convey maybe a little bit you know maybe it was too much maybe it was too crazy but to our current audience that was the message i wanted to convey visually where um with monolith right um we are trying to materialize ethereum's transcendental potential here and um that's the brand and the vibe we want to carry um and indeed for describing it for our

users and for for listeners um when you get the monolith box right it's covered in artwork which is you know kind of hinting of this you know futuristic world and when you card is suspended it hangs there in space and it's supposed to be a monolith and our current cards are green but we are about to launch well i mean i'll say about to launch we have new cards and i actually have one here a production sample so uh and they're in the shape of the portal the one you can see behind me in the background here we have more new designs that is beautiful that's awesome and so it literally should be that when you open the box the card is suspended it's floating in there it's kind of a

visual illusion and it's a portal and you know what you're seeing is you're you're seeing a portal to this new ethereum realm right and and the characters all of these characters these you know these um these characters that we have and they are you they are the user they are what we call the ethereans these first pioneers of this new realm people who once were human right but who have now stepped into this new realm and have become you know almost mutated into these new beings which you represent as like human animal alien hybrids right uh just because you know animals yeah yes

and and um yeah like that that's what we all should feel like when we're pioneering when we're using monoliths when we're pioneering you know all the amazing stuff in in our d fight economy um anyway that was that was so good it's super cool you know bankless visa cards is better than the the black visa card that all the celebrities have it is definitely a rite of passage here's somebody from our discord actually showing one off yep that's cool that's very cool yeah mel i love the energy that you bring to uh to the description of how you view ethereum and we definitely share share that vibe as well

um so as we come to the to the conclusion of this ama what's next for monolith like what what can users and people expect to see in the remainder of 2020 in early 2021 um i think we're we're rolling out a bunch of features that um are quite pressing um we want to make um the products really like be the ultimate tool that someone in the default space can use right so um you know like we have to solve for gas basically and we have to solve the people's ability to actually interact with all the d5 stuff

um beyond that i think what we're currently doing internally we're going through a massive exercise um we have we have like one very amazing advisor who's got incredible experience in the finance world who's kind of overseeing the next evolution of monolith um where we really in the next year are are setting up to achieve the dream i've outlined of creating a d5 experience that is tailored to someone who doesn't know what the hell defy is and that will deliver them an experience of money that they just can't get anywhere else

um that's what um we're basically yeah like right now most focused on and really excited for and yeah we're gonna blow everyone away solid foundation we are excited uh to see it thanks for hanging with us on this community ama you know mel i can't let you leave without asking this last question i don't know if you're into them but we kind of like price predictions a little bit here on bank list don't we david so i'm wondering if you i'm wondering if you have one do you have any price predictions for um ether and and bitcoin let's um let's do it in this window in this next bull run which we think we are just starting

uh call it the next bull run the next two to three years price predictions for eth or bitcoin so in in three years you're saying at the peak price in three years at the p well yeah let's say people people like yeah what's our mountain top what is our everest sir um i mean jeez i haven't made a price prediction in years um now's the time yeah that's why they're fun the gut tape don't think about it too hard you're already thinking about it too hard yeah look i think uh vitalik and his cohorts are probably um some of the most excellent people in the world and i am an absolute die hard believer in the fact that ethereum will succeed sure

others may succeed as well but ethereum is the one to best on um and that means that you know as the world actually starts to realize what the hell is going on in our space it's not just about crazy speculation anymore it is in fact about totally uprooting the nature of our society no price is really high enough right but but obviously it has to peak somewhere and then it'll all come crashing down and then we're back in you know awful awful times again for a while before it all goes up again i would say the next mega bull run eve probably would be i know you know probably like it'll definitely go over ten thousand um there you go

10k trillion dollar market cap right there male 1.2 it has been a pleasure to have you on the bankless community ama uh please come back sometime and uh thanks for all the work you guys are doing we appreciate it i i super appreciate what you guys are doing for the space and thank you both david and ryan for having me cheers and all the lists excellent take care bye bye