Taylor Monahan: From Side Project to Center Stage – The Story of MyEtherWallet & MyCrypto (#317)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 317 with guest tailor Monahan hi welcome to epicenter my name is sibbeston Cuchillo today our guest is Taylor Monahan Taylor is the founder and CEO of my crypto now if you haven't used my crypto you've probably heard of it and you've probably heard of its predecessor my ether wallet where Taylor was also a co-founder now those two projects split after co-founder

dispute and lawsuit in 2017 but Taylor tells the story of how my ether wallet came into existence and how the project evolved and grew with the different market cycles that he theorem went through most notably the ICO boom of 2016 and 2017 she also tells the story of how her and her co-founder ended up going separate ways and how my crypto came out of that dispute and lawsuit Taylor also shares her thoughts about where the etherium space is going she shares her hopes but also her fears about where the ecosystem could be heading it was a great conversation as

is often the case with these episodes where we go back and look at previous times in the space that kind of throwback conversations it's interesting to take a step back and learn from the lessons of previous market cycles FeliCa and Brian the distant of you and I hope you'll enjoy it before we go to the interview I'd like to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode starting with a brand new sponsor Peppo if you haven't heard of pet bone the way I describe it is it's a cross between tick tock Twitter and steamin tick tock because the way you interact with people is through 30 second videos Twitter because the kind of content you'll find there very much

resemble the kind of content you'd find on Twitter or at least crypto Twitter and steam it because there's a built-in cryptocurrency that you use to tip people that you follow in content that you'd like and you can use this cryptocurrency which is called Peppo coins to buy gift cards at a bunch of different merchants so like Amazon who buries Starbucks and there's a whole bunch of different ones there so it's actually quite useful so I've been using Peppo for a couple of weeks now I started using it when I was at SF blockchain week and I did a bunch of content there and recently I've been using it to tell folks about what's happening with the podcast so last week I posted a video where I shared who would be on the show in December and I asked the question who should we have on

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you need to do there's no action required on your part but if you're interested in learning more about the upgrade process and everything that's happening around the upgrade process go to blog cosmos Network they're posting regular updates there you should also follow them on Twitter so the governance proposals that are gonna be passed in this heart fork are the following the community pool is now active so governance will be able to spend funds from the community pool this has changed to how governance deposits on veto proposals will be burned there's a number of security updates and they're increasing the set of validators from 100 to 125 validators this is all really exciting because it shows blockchain governance at work these proposals were all passed through governance and they're now being implemented into the cosmos hub as part of that process so if

you want to learn more and if you want to stay up to date you should definitely sign up for the newsletter like cosmos not network scroll down to the bottom of the page there sign up for the newsletter and while you're there also check out game of zones which is the adversarial test met challenge which is being set up by the cosmos team in preparation for the deployment of IBC we'd like to thank cosmos for the support of the podcast and with that here's our interview with Taylor Monahan so we're here today with Taylor Monahan he's the founder and the CEO of my crypto which is you know one of the most popular hearing wallets that probably many users have used or perhaps my ether which is a similar product with sort of

the same same background in history and we'll get into a little bit the details here so and she's also been very outspoken on many topics such as like usability security yeah and so thanks so much for joining us today Taylor yeah thank you so much for having me so I heard a little bit about your background and some other interviews that you were originally you study film tell us about that like how does one go from film to you know running a crypto wallet company I don't know a lot actually I was really passionate about film and storytelling

and in the production side of things in both high school and then at university and then yeah I dropped out of film school after a couple years not because I suddenly lost my passion for film or anything but just because I wanted to focus sort of all my energy on on creating these these films that weren't necessarily for school I was kind of over the like going to classes and doing homework and I did that for for a bit more time and it was an interesting time obviously of my life because I think everyone goes through huge changes you know when they're that 18 to 22 range

they curl up a lot and I certainly did but it was also an interesting time just in terms of of the economy because 2008 had happened you know there weren't really that many jobs floating around and you know when I kind of picked my head up and looked around I realized that I was this liberal art school dropout you know with one of the highest rates of unemployment that we had seen in a long long time and so I basically just started sort of hustling I guess I I got a job like assisting with sort of marketing and creating product videos and shooting product images and updating the website and you know just whatever I

could get my hands on and it really just grew from there I I quickly realized that you know the skills that I learned and the things I've enjoyed about making films and telling stories film was just the medium and I found that you know with marketing and with making websites and all of this stuff you know there's a lot of overlap yeah totally yeah I'm curious where does that entrepreneurial Drive of yours come from probably my dad he has always had at least one business sort of going and he's he's an engineer and so he's you know very logical very much a creator very much a problem

solver like when I have like boy drama in high school I would not go to him because he would like try to logically solve the problem yeah his brain operates in that way and I I definitely take after my father a bit in that regard but my mom is like the polar opposite she's a teacher she is highly empathetic she gets people just inherently you know if you come to her with a problem she will not try to fix it she will advertise with you so I think sort of that mixture of yeah I mean my entire life was this very you know sort of highly empathetic on one end and then highly logical on the other and they always encouraged me to to do whatever it was that made me happy they were never like don't go to film

school get a real job and they were never like that's a terrible decision they they've always let me find my own sort of path and just kind of guided me rather than forcing me to do something so you got into programming via bedding home pages I said so yeah essentially I was um you know I was updating the website so you notice first it was like figure out how to change this text or change this image but very rapidly like I loved it so very rapidly I I was teaching myself how to build you know little single page sites little landing pages obviously I was quite desperate for like money I wanted money to go out on the weekends I wanted money in my

bank account so I started doing any family or friends that needed a website I would hustle my way and convince them that I could build it for them and that kind of stuff when you learn how to program in that way it's interesting because you don't necessarily have the full breadth of knowledge that this yes students have but you have a lot more knowledge about how these things are sort of used and put into practice and you realize that at the end of the day yes having sort of like the best code or the prettiest code of the most elegant code it's really nice it makes things more maintainable in the long term but if you don't have

an end product or in whatever you're building if that doesn't serve a purpose if that doesn't solve the client's problem you're not going to it's a is not gonna matter how pretty the code is yeah I see so what's the first time that you heard of crypto abduction I don't know the exact like date or what article or anything I've looked for it endlessly because I'm so curious as to like what struck me and pulled me in but it was obviously it was during the first sort of or I guess the second but my first sort of bull run you know that 2012 2013 2014 era it was before mount Cox happened it was that time where there

was a lot excitement in the air and a lot of like the mainstream media or like you know like the Mashable's and the gizmo tows and you know they were all talking about the blockchain and I remember I read a couple things but I didn't get sucked in and then more and more people started talking about it and at some point yeah I just completely fell down the rabbit hole and then of course you know shortly thereafter Mount Cox happens and the price falls off a cliff and the entire ecosystem was it wasn't like depressed but it was it was pretty angry I would say like there were a lot of really angry people around and

it wasn't really the happiest time it was kind of jarring like how fast that all happened yeah I mean it's interesting when I think back to that time I I also kind of discovered Bitcoin around a similar time which I think it's maybe like May 2013 and in the thing is to me it made so much sense Bitcoin and I was convinced that everybody is gonna start to like recognize the same thing and everybody was gonna start you know getting on this thing as well and then it was sort of at the same time that you know the price started increasing and people started getting into it and I was like okay it's obviously happening now like everybody soon gonna be using Bitcoin and then when it crashed when it sort of like man walks and all this stuff happened it

just didn't really register for me I thought this was just some sort of blip and then it would be right back up and this this whole like years of depression that kind of came afterwards it took me ages to realize that there's really a kind of a deeper sort of sense of crisis going on yeah it was a crisis and it was a um I think it was sort of a reckoning for all of us it was interesting because at that time McQueen was seen as sort of like the next payment layer you could buy things like an offender would start accepting Bitcoin and like everyone would go and run and buy their product with their Bitcoin and stuff yeah and

then as like the the price crash happened and and you know the fallout from Mount Cox was the way that that the news was sort of slowly delivered over time did not help anything yeah I think that everyone sort of had a reckoning of like what are we doing you know is this going to happen what you know sort of what needs to change and there was definitely a collision of sort of the very early the OGIS of Bitcoin who were very sort of anarchists they had very strong philosophies in terms of privacy and in terms of identity and stuff like that and then you had like sort of these people that were the people that saw Bitcoin it's like the next payment layer

you know and the buyer coffee with Bitcoin buy everything with Bitcoin and then you have to get rich quick hearse that were just flushed out but when I think back to that time I think a lot about sort of I draw comparisons to that time and today just because there are similarities like we haven't had a huge sort of Mount GOx crisis but we have sort of had a bit of a crisis of identity I guess or reckoning with hey are we gonna be able to do this or what are we trying to do what are we trying to accomplish yeah for sure so to go back up a bit in time but we should we should put maybe come back to the state today as well so you have most are you most known for

your work in the hiriam space you know when did you kind of switch your focus from Bitcoin to e theorem and you know what was your you early interactions with either I'm community yeah in 2014 so during this sort of Depression era of Bitcoin and the etherium white paper I started sort of being I guess passed around I think that's the best way to put it just because the way that like I first heard about a theory and then the white paper and vitalik the first link I actually like clicked was like some YouTube videos like it was like a Google Hangouts you know that was recorded and they were all sitting in their living rooms and they were talking about

staking and proof of stake and the potential and the possibilities you know and given and sort of the context of where Bitcoin was at the time it just made sense to me that things were going to evolve and there was going to be a next sort of stop and I was also just sort of I wouldn't say I was over Bitcoin but I was I was sort of over the community like I wasn't spending as much time on Reddit I was never really a fan of Bitcoin talk but you know it's just sort of yeah I wasn't fully engrossed in it like I had been previously so I was checking on ethereum are scaring a lot of good things and you know we had amassed a very very similar collection

of Bitcoin during this time and so I think we just I don't know how much we put into the presale but we just kind of took some of that pile of Bitcoin that we collected over time and yeah and put it in the etherion presale and then honestly I sort of like kept up to date on stuff but I really went back to sort of my regular life for a while there until ethereum launched and when aetherium launched it launched without a any user interface to manage your funds you just had like the clients the nodes the the command-line interface and literally like I was trying to figure out how to you know move my funds from this presale wallet file that had to be

emailed to us and I was like oh this is not ideal like this is not going to work like I use terminal before like I typed commands in but there was no way I was about to move money by typing in commands and so we literally yeah we uh we put together we did what we had been doing basically the previous three years in our in our sort of real lives and we put together like a super simple little application little website whatever you want to call it that would just basically put buttons on top of the on top of the command line interface right it was very like one-to-one interaction style and that allowed me to create a new paper wallet

and then it allowed me to send from my existing preset wallet to that paper wallet when we first sort of like clone felt launched it it wasn't my ether wallet it was just like a thing it was just this tool that solves our problem and that was it you know it wasn't supposed to be anything else so that was back in 2015 right right so this was like the etherion presale was August 2014 or something and so then fast forward a year etherium launched in July of 2015 and so during that whole period of time are sort of like not really super I was in and out of the the ecosystem I was watching sort of what was happening but I was not I was not sitting there like

obsessed Oh watching everything or reading everything I could anymore you had a co-founder back then right right so when I would talk about we it was a coal salon me we work together in our regular traditional office jobs building random things for clients basically what our clients wanted and cola is I guess like full stack back-end he's an engineer like he's a real engineer and I'm the I was always like the front end and the product person and the the interface between like the user and and the program that makes things happens but I was also the interface between like the engineers and the sea levels at the company and ours the

interface between the engineers and the client and so I think that that dynamic it worked well at the company we're working for but it also it worked well sort of for the the blockchain space as well because it turned out to be a very similar problems how did you go from okay we're building a little tool that's you know useful to okay let's let's go ahead with this and kind of build a company and you know really take it forward as a start-up so there's never like a decision I think to like push it forward it was um you know we have a problem so we solved it and then we shared it with some

friends and then we shared it with reddit and then read it told us that we should build this feature or that feature or give us feedback and I think like or the early versions we had an email address in the footer there was probably like my ether wallet at gmail or like even just my email and we'd got these emails from people who were like trying to figure out the blockchain right like trying to figure out what the hell this thing was and I didn't necessarily know the answers I don't know I would say oh it's like one foot in the space in one foot out like I got it I understood it I liked it I could see the potential but I was not fully like obsessed and I wasn't I wasn't super technically knowledgeable about all of the inner workings and so how I

sort of transformed from being one foot in one foot out to being all the way in was people would ask me questions and then I would go and find the answer for them and in that process I would learn the answer and I would ask you know ask closely I'd be like I remember one of them in the very early days I asked well I was like why does everyone else need gas to sign to ether but we don't and he was like you do and I was like what he's like yeah it's just hard coded like you don't see it we don't have a feel for it it's just hard coded and I was like oh I know nothing you know is one of those moments and really that sort of

progression of interacting with people like learning ourselves learning what people wanted learning what people were struggling with watching the space sort of evolve watching the realization as like someone aetherium lunch like right you had like proof of steak was like the hottest thing like we ever one wanted it and this sort of concept of like everything would be abstracted away in the contracts at some point how we are still waiting for that right like everything your contract yeah we are so really like during this time like I assume that like contracts would take over and that we want to be able to keep up and I assume that mist would launch and we wouldn't you know be needed anymore and so it's

always very sort of an ephemeral building experience like we were very much just building for right now but the Dow happened and we kind of got our reality check I suppose was there any hesitation to build a tool that lets people interact with money or values so blatantly I mean we all had to Eisen up from a legal perspective at some point when did that happen for you guys so my biggest concern the first sort of corn cup version that we put on reddit the biggest concern I had was if our code is written poorly and like say it doesn't generate wallets properly then that

could hurt everyone and that was my biggest concern and very early on we sort of made the the decision together to that that we would like never touch the magic that generates a wallet because there have been so many issues with other wallets and yeah there's just been really bad things that happen and if you like if you drive the key pairs improperly you can basically you can give people an address that doesn't match the private key so they can't actually add the a they can't access the funds in it but you can also if you don't use enough entropy all of the wallets that you generate could eventually like be brute force or be hacked down the road and so that was my

biggest concern was like how can we not do that I was uh even still saying today right I knew enough to be terrified but I didn't know enough to like really understand what was happening and so I would just basically be like a nervous Nellie like you messaging calls love meeting like hey I saw you change this line of code that has no potentials through anything operate that's exactly what your program is like keyring so you feel like yeah no that's not it's not anyone here that Taylor like what are you even talking about but I think that that paranoia yeah I can be it can be obnoxious but it

can also prevent bad things from happening and I think that that paranoia sort of lives with me today lives with the team and I think it's one of the reasons that we're so obsessed with security is basically like I'm a super overanxious person who's scared of things yeah and so was this just a sort of gradual thing that you know the volume of these requests and emails you know it was increasing and then I guess you know a theorem started kind of taking off notice especially with the ICO bubble that happened that you know then at some point you know you had to drop everything else and then it was full-on my ether wallet or what was that kind of transition yeah so at some point I left my job and I started freelancing

for clients I was building marketing websites for a whole diverse range of people and I eventually join a remote team of like a remote web development shop where I didn't have to deal with like the invoicing I didn't have to go and find the clients I could just sort of build and bring ideas to life and that kind of stuff and so that was sort of one half of my life and then I don't know it wasn't one half of my life it was like I had all these different projects going on and my ether wallet was just another one right like I have client one client to client three like my cousin wants the copy updated on his website oh and like some dude on reddit told me that we have a typo on the help

page you know it was just like another piece of my of the things that I did every day and the biggest change actually was was when the dal happened that's really when I sort of went like full ethereum where it started taking over my life because it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to anyone ever you know that had of the dowel the entire sort of ecosystem in her community was like sitting in the doubt slack Grif was like inspirational right like you just you can't help but be happy around him and be inspired and believe that the world's gonna change and stuff like that what

excited you so much I think that again it was like it was the optimism and it was the potential it was like for so long we had seen Bitcoin in aetherium as maybe a payment layer or maybe a way to buy things or maybe a way to send money but it hadn't really been realized right you know you occasionally got the opportunity to pay your crypto friend back like that was sort of the extent of using crypto and the Dow sort of flipped everything on its head because all of a sudden you could put that money to use at least that's what it felt like right now looking back maybe not right because like even if the dow hadn't been hacked

would that have been successful like what would have happened you know would the wisdom of the crowd make good choices yeah I mean it was much ahead of its time I guess but yeah it was very much ahead of its time but the yeah I think that idea that just surrounding sort of capital allocation and the fact that you could do something and the fact that there was a whole new set of problems to solve right because it was there was technical things that needed to be overcome in order to like interact with the dow or buy your down tokens or whatever but there was also like this very human problem where when you're voting for something you're you can be

very easily influenced and since votes and the outcome of vote is often like a zero-sum outcome the little influence can go a long way yeah I did a lot of research on voting and interfaces and stuff when the Dow was going on because I found it fascinating how did you send him and change as soon as it was hacked I don't think it hit me like I remember being like this is big and I remember being like we were not we were right but so I had had a conversation with Stefan t'wall we'd hopped on a phone call to talk about something maybe like three days before it was hacked and it had gotten big right like the the pile of money that was in the Dow was far bigger than

anyone ever imagined and I remember we were just like at the end of the call we were just like kind of shooting the and yeah we I can't remember exactly what he said but he basically was like you know this is a very we're in a very precarious position because nobody expected it to get this big its dominating the ecosystem it's no longer this this experiment to see you know if we can more efficiently allocate capital and if it goes down you know that that could be like a mount GOx type crisis and I knew it right like I knew he was right and I was I was worried and then when it happened

he was like yeah it's in your bones you're just like oh my god is happening but I immediately went into problem-solving mode right like a lot of people especially the people that that heard about the Dow hack immediately like sent all of their down so consider exchange and tried to get out not like never crossed my mind I just wanted to help solve the problem in whatever way which was mostly like trying to not have everyone panic and trying not to have the community devolve into like trolls and insults and hatred and you know like anytime you have a crisis or scary things happen the worst in people comes out very much love the worst thing

people comes out no that was definitely an intense time well let's go a little bit forward I don't know maybe it was last year or two years ago there was a split right where you and Kosovo ended up going separate paths and then you know kind of my crypto emerged from dad and you know my ether bowl at this you know is still around today so what happened back then yeah I mean so this whole time that I've been talking you may have noticed like I never talked about getting a lawyer or setting up corporate documents or anything we didn't even have an LLC for half of our existence I don't think there's no company even at all there was nothing it was just it was like me and

coleslaw and hangouts talking yeah and at some point my dad found out that there was not an LLC and he's like no you're idiots you're you're susceptible you put an LLC in front of you so that if if something goes wrong with your product you know people won't sue you personally and I still had like pretty much no money so I was like well what am i giving that if they see me you know but I said have we set up the LLC but you know in that context that LLC was set up to have an LLC this that LLC was not set up to ensure that Khosla and I had proper expectations about the company or our responsibilities within the company

or anything at all right it was just a company to sort of protect us if things were to go wrong and so between sort of the DAO period and the split aetherium went from I mean price-wise I went from like $10 to $1,200 but my ether-wall became like the the de-facto way to interact with aetherium it was the way to get into I cos it was we went from you know like a couple emails asking for features or asking questions about the blockchain to like maybe a thousand emails a day you know we were like during some of the icos hour we would

like our support amongst didn't even have like they don't have like a like a rate limit or anything but they do prevent you from using their system to spam right like to send spam and so like there's like a limit of like you can't send more than like I don't know five hundred or thousand emails a day and like we we would hit that because we were we get a thousand tickets and maybe 90% of them the answer was hey here's how you can like look at your transaction and the network's really clogged right now because of the bat token sale and just give it some time or you know whatever it was and we would rapid fire we have like a standard a response for those things that sort of

had like the top three solutions in one answer and we would basically just like you know reply spam to everyone and yeah and at some point Cole and I nobody had ever asked us what we wanted out of my either wallet and I don't think we ever asked ourselves either and so how I react to situations where people rely on me it's like I double down and so if there's a thousand emails in the support box I'm like well I have to answer a thousand emails let's go like get me some coffee and that's not everyone's way of dealing with just and dealing with pressure I mean Cole Sulli handled it much

differently and due to just the fact that we're different people and we weren't really communicating that much and everything was on fire you know our relationship and pretty much like everything around this thing just just broke down and then lawyers got involved and once the lawyers were involved like everything's hopeless it's always from there so I had like hired people I think we were maybe there was like eight of us at the point where the lawyers got involved and I was still dealing with like all the I SEOs and like all the crazy things that were happening this baby isn't like there were hackers going after us and phishing was the thing and it was a crazy period it was just insane but I took just so many different law

firms and lawyers and a lawyer sort of opinion or like take on winning I don't know like logically winning the case is winning to them right okay so what we like go and do this stuff and then we and the court says like you're right you win and that's gonna be like a year or two years from now I'm gonna pay you just a boatload of money and for what who wins from that I looked at what I wanted right for the first time in a really long time I looked at like what it was and the things that I wanted the most was like I wanted to not have to lay off the people that I had hired because

people had like quit their jobs to work for me people that had like dropped out of school to work for me people were relying on you know the salary that I paid them and so I didn't want to have to like just shut everything down or lay everyone off I didn't want the community to suffer I didn't want there to be a void you know where I'm like you know I screwed this like it's not worth it let's just walk away I was so scared that that was a real possibility I'm not getting doing so the like the fishing like the fishers and the scammers and the hackers and all the malicious actors that are you know just that flood the crypto space would they would win and

that was probably one of my biggest concerns was like what can we do to try to limit the amount that sort of the scammers can win because if they win then we all lose yeah and at some point someone told us like we're an open-source project and that there was like a weird third sort of path that we could take which is you know just start a real company and call it something different and I figured that that outcome allowed the most parties to win right because sort of in every other path there was always like a huge loser but in this path there wasn't really a loser right like I lost the the brand and the domain name that was my ether

wallet you know my lost the Twitter handle for a while which was a fat pile of drama there were all these little losses that happened but at the end of the day it was pretty much in that way and I actually think that looking back everyone is one right so at that point in time my Etha wanted didn't have a business model right we were basically sustained on the very early donations that we had received in 2015 and 2016 and the fact that those donations had increased in value so much so people who had sort of donated a cup of coffee back in 2015 had actually donated like a month of server time in 2017 and then we had we still have the the

affiliate programs with the hardware wallets and we have the swap functionality which gives us a kickback we had via on-ramps which gives us a kickback and all of these paid out in either ether or Bitcoin which then like just kept going up in value so that I kept the lights on but it definitely was not it was not sustainable and it wasn't it wasn't even clear during that time how much money we had made because like you know how much Bitcoin you've made how much ether you've made but what how much USD is that you know especially when the USD value is doubling every day when you switched and you know like started my crypto as a separate company

did you raise money at that point tell us a little bit about sort of the journey that you've gone through from you know this rough-and-tumble little bit chaotic improvising world to like you know running a proper a proper home startup and yeah and I think you race to see money afterwards as well at some point yeah so I'm actually starting in like the I would say like maybe mid 2017 that's when I was I was basically like I couldn't do anything but my Heath or wallet like I did completely taken over my life and I started hiring people and they're all there are all these problems

and none of the problems that I was encountering like I did not have an any idea how to solve any of them I didn't know how to manage people I didn't know how to I think I didn't know anything new nothing you know my dad I was talking to him one day and he was like we'll go find the experts who have done this before and have them tell you like how to solve it because like nothing that you're running up against right now he's like I know it seems like a really big deal but like nothing that you're running up against is original or new and so over the course of sort of building building my ether wallet I had a number of relationships with really smart people in the ecosystem and a few relationships with with investors but

not as investors like they also investors also bought in at the Dow if you guys didn't know you know what I mean so I went up to us off and I I sat down with brain and Adam from boost VC who I had I had talked to a few times previously then I sat down with Olaf who was was that poly chain that sort of poly chain by that point and I asked them I asked them all the questions that I had right like I asked them all the things that I didn't know and we talked for hours about everything that was happening about yeah bout like contracts and things that can go wrong and risk and products building and team building and remote teams and you know on and on

and on and so then once we had established the my crypto and the new company and thank goodness for Olaf and all I've had called we were texting when I and he'd called like the bear market so freaking early and he was like look the biggest thing that you need to figure out right now is how you're gonna be sustainable when we go through another markets like Oh like we went through and he's like so he's like go find you know a numbers person figure out how much money you guys have actually made or figure out what what your business model is and see what you can do to survive you know the next couple years that are gonna be pretty rough and I was like wait what are you

talking about like you know everything was so hyped it blew my mind I was like that's not it's just gonna be it's gonna keep being like this and no it was not gonna keep being like that we were gonna go through another market cycle of course and so yeah the goal was to survive to figure out our business model to make sure that you know the team could keep building and thriving and being employed and things like that and so we raised a it's actually it was a series around just because the point that we were hot at the company even though the company it existed for like I don't know a month but yeah all the investors are people that had already been helping me for months or years at that point it was fantastic cool gratulations is such an awesome story

and well done so tell us where currently at or where the product is current yet so what what does the microp doe offering currently entail yeah so okay so my crypto when we first split the product was almost the same right like I had a different logo and that was that was pretty much it and over time the product has evolved one of the biggest things that we had decided pretty early on was that I I didn't want to do this whole private keys and heister files and in mnemonic phrases like all these these little bits of information I really didn't want to

keep those on the web or on websites that was the entire thing was you like went to a web site and pasted your private key and then you sent your money around that was it that was the entire concept which turns out to be really dangerous for so many reasons and so once we I decided that we didn't want to do that anymore we realized that like okay we need like an application or we need to up the interactions with hardware wallets or whatever there's a whole bunch of different solutions and we also realized that the code base was you know had been had not been written for the long term so we rewrote everything using react and when we like wrote documentation and we

thought about the architecture and and all of these things that you do when you have a team of engineers instead of you know like two people randomly building for tomorrow and then we built the deaths we had the one code base that builds sort of two different versions the desktop application and the website and they have you know slightly different functionality and then during this time sort of simultaneously we had started working on new designs which are in beta right now because the biggest thing that I want to I guess solve or the biggest thing that I thought I I want my crypto to be able to do is I want it to transform from being this tool and this is sort of like you go to

my crypto and you interact and then you leave I wanted it to be useful on a number of different levels so if you go to beta my crypto calm right now you now have like a dashboard and every time you you can like add an account so every time you you unlock your your wallet your ledger you're about to ask whatever it is you'll have like that account will be added to your list of accounts and then you can see like the balances across all of your accounts and when you send you select the account you want to send from and we have like a pie graph that shows you all the breakdown of your tokens and aute ransacked in history so you can see the transactions for all of

your accounts all on the sash board I'm super excited because that's it changes sort of everything it changes from being a open source tool that you use when you need it to being something that hopefully can actually serve you on sort of your day to day life or it can more closely sort of mimic the patterns that were used to when we're using products that are fun and that are useful and that are enjoyable yes what do you think is the biggest thing that these changes will in what way will it improve the user experience or once interaction one of the biggest problems in the

ethereum space right now is that we went through this period of time a very very heavy speculation right of the I SEOs and the capital allocation or whatever you want to call it right but where that leaves us today is that you have everyone who has a pile of tokens that are maybe useful right like some of them are useful some of them have governance properties and some of them hypothetically will be used in a dot somewhere down the road but for the most part you simply hold these tokens because you have them and there's no use for them right now and I want to push people down a path of understanding

why these tokens have value rather than like assigning a USD value to them or just speculating on them because that's where we're at right now and that's why most of the ecosystem doesn't look at their portfolio because it'll tell them that they you know that they're down 99.9 percent I'm not there everything is red and everything is a bloodbath but the reality is is that the tokens not all the tokens but the tokens that do you actually have utility or will have utility or do you have value those are going to be the drivers of the etherium ecosystem and someone needs to tell people what the frick they can do with them at some point so doesn't the - but

would em facilitate native DEP into action yeah so one thing that we're gonna be that's done is we have a really robust sort of style guide or document that lays out sort of our whole thinking about gaps and interactions so that not only can we build little interaction layers little micro interactions to say like lend your lender your tokens or lend your eath for on compound and gain interest by other people since your open source could hypothetically do it as well the idea is that everyone's dashboard can be a little bit different and it can

serve them so if people are more speculative like they're gonna want to see their paragraphs and their increases and and all the money numbers right where if people are super into all the GFI stuff that's happening today they're gonna want to see yeah how is that CDP doing how you know what's going on with compound all of these different layers the other interesting thing is that I'd have to be careful how I talk about this because it can get really creepy but it's not you'll see okay so the dashboard knows like the client write the code knows what you like what tokens you hold and it you can write code to

determine what any user has done or has or holds or whatever right and if we were Google or Facebook we would just take all that information and horde it and sell it and exploit everyone but luckily we're not and so I want to figure out ways to give people useful and valuable information about sort of their state like give them options or give them information that can help them sort of make the most of their crypto situation and so one good example of this that we have this is like I think the only thing we have implemented right now is if you hold like a boatload of eath in a private key it will pester you

and poke you to get a hardware wallet or to consider running you know offline basically saying like hey this private key has a lot of money in it and you would be very well served by getting a hardware wallet and being safe and the most interesting thing about all of this is that it all happens within the application so it's not like the server's not processing this like we don't even know this we don't know you we don't know what is going on we just like the code just knows that if a person has a private key type and the value is greater than X dollars then show them a mess that tells them to stop holding all of their money in a private key

that's super cool actually that sort of brings up a question to me do you know like how many users my crypto has like how many transactions and what kind of like value is held in those apps is that data that you can have access to we've never really collected data for a number of reasons but most analytic softwares are like another security hole that you're just like opening up and then obviously there's immense like privacy concerns we've always had like limited information that sort of tells us where we are relative to where we were and so a good example of this is like how much does the server bill cost every month because it turns out if you have like way more users than you did last month

the server is gonna cost you any more and so we have sort of those sort of stats we've had some short-lived liked counters on like how many transactions get sent through our node not kind of stuff so what I can tell you is based on all the information that I have which is super limited where we are right now is very different from where we were two years ago the interactions that people are taking are remarkably different the types of people that use our product are remarkably different it seems like most of the people that are using our product which are I suppose people that didn't leave my ether wallet but also people that are still actively doing stuff in

the etherium space right diet type of person seems to be someone who is sort of very very ingrained I would say in the ecosystem and they typically are sending very deliberately right like the the things that they're doing are deliberate actions rather than in 2017 it was like everyone was just running around like like a chicken with their head cut off it's just different and it's some of it's the state of the ecosystem a lot of it is that the question is like what what can you do right now with your ether ready like where can you get value and defy is obviously one of the most exciting things but it's also sort of an infrastructure layer its lending your

ethos not something to write home about or it's not like a nice yeah it's not one of those hyped up things it's it's like a default state I would say markets aren't really all that sexy we already touched upon this briefly earlier you are an enormous advocate for hardware wallets do you think that is user experience we should be aiming for or it's just just a stepping stone I think it's a stepping stone the reason I'm such an advocate of Hardware Wallace is that it is good balance between usability and security you can use a hardware wallet it's not that hard and if you think about what a hardware all it actually does it

essentially gives sort of your average person access to like true deep cold storage which is not something that it traditionally people do but it also makes it easy enough to do so it's very easy to make a cold paper wallet not so cold anymore they're also the sort of interaction layer is is still like this layer one right we're still talking about keys we're still talking about signing our transaction and sending that transaction and I think that in the future we will see much more complex authorizations and ways of proving ownership and ways that we send our funds and those will probably be you

know a smart contract based however I'm still not convinced that we are ready to have everyone put all of their money in a smart contract wallet do you think at some point people they'll use my crypto but they won't even know they're using aetherium and you know it will all be sort of abstracted away or do you think it's important that users will kind of continue to have some understanding of you know what happens underneath so I think that with my crypto since we are at least in our current form you know wallet I think that sort of the existence of ether and the existence of the network and the blockchain are

important and those things are also empowering and I do want to you know sort of educate people more about why this all matters and what's actually happening rather than than abstracting like I want to abstract away the technical stuff but I don't want to abstract away the fact that you're controlling your money and that's a powerful thing I do think that most like if you're building a product in the space if you're building a game or adapt or if you're solving different problems on the one we're solving then I would say that the ideal state would be that the blockchain and the ether and the tokens and the gas and all of that matters far far less

like ideally whatever your product is doing that should be what these are gets out of it right like they should land on the dap not to buy your token and sunday like they should land on the dap because they want to get that decentralized uber or that decentralized Airbnb or play that game yeah I'm not interact with the block sort of brings up another topic that has been on my mind quite a bit when you started my crypto when I became interested in blockchain it was very much the idea of like ok you control your own keys and this was like hell this is something very crucial seems like over the last years centralized

exchanges have just a mast you know enormous power gigantic resources you know they're increasingly doing more things too right besides just raiding you know you have a futures and derivatives now exchanges are starting to do staking spoke maybe changes they want to maybe offer access to like ePHI products and furs and do like so many different things how would you look at that do you think we are moving more towards ask crypto assets being custody how is that going to play out we're on that path I guess one of the things that I regret when I look back at that sort of 2017 and the amount of people that

were using my ether wallet was that we did a lot to educate them on how to stay safe and we're relatively speaking like successful at that I would say like I wish that we had done more to give people access to information about why the blockchain is different and why it matters because we had the opportunity to take people who were using our products simply because a regulated exchange did not allow direct investment into an IC o---- smart contract we had that we had all of these people that were not only using our product but also using our products for exactly what the blockchain was built for but they didn't

know that they just think that they are going to get rich I think that we do have to get that hour at explaining why the blockchain is different and what value that adds and like what the competitive advantages are because at the end of the day like we're very close to having the clinical blockchain become just another word and it probably it probably already has but it still holds meaning for me Liz we're very close to forgetting that the value of the blockchain is that it's like an immutable ledger right the value of the blockchain is that you can be in control that you can hold people accountable that you can provide transparency and if we're using centralized custodian

services for everything that we do then like why are we doing that on the blockchain right because you're not getting any of the advantages of the blockchain if you're if everything's happening in the exchange it's like you're getting all the worst bits like you're getting like this weird user experience you're getting this terrible regulatory space you're not getting the power and the control into the hands of individuals you're not getting the transparency you're not getting the accountability and then just throw the security issues on top of it and it's like you know realistically why Queen base over PayPal venmo your bank if you look at the entire deck space I mean there's many textures out there but if you look at the volumes they can't

really compete with centralized exchanges currently do you think that's going to change and do you think that's going to give the blockchain back meaning maybe so I actually I had the most fascinating call yesterday with these guys who are more involved in like the OTC and the market maker side of things which is a side of the industry that I really have a very little information on and one of the things that I learned was that with Jax's it's not just the volume that sort of increases the spreader or gives users a worse price than centralized exchanges there's this whole other layer of like the market makers are taking on additional risk and there's

front-running because everything's on chain and there's now gas and now there's gas to cancel an order and basically a lot of the reasons that the prices aren't competitive with centralized exchanges is due to all of these things collectively it's not just the volume when you think about competing with the centralized exchange you have the competitiveness on price right am i getting the best price for my token but you also have the user experience and then you have the security we have to figure out how to solve all three of those problems before it'll compete with the custodians it'll be very very interesting to see how this plays out because the most natural solution is to

take everything off chain right like if you don't want gas then you take it off chain if you don't want gas for cancellation fees you take it off chain and so is there a way to take certain interactions off chain without sacrificing the other values right without just put it in a database somewhere and it'll be interesting to see how these problems get solved I definitely do not have the answers though listen happens that way and you know you dreams for how the blockchain space turns out and for the change it brings to the world you know all come true what does the world look like most of all I want a world where the existing power structures are sort of flipped on their

head I want a world where individual people like those humans the Me's and they use and everyone's where they have more power and where power flows to them with the products that they use not the other way around right now if I use Facebook literally in doing so I'm giving more power to Facebook and that flow is always in all the products and services we use I mean all the structures and the systems that we interact with everywhere in our lives the flow of power the flow of control is always from the individual to another entity and if we can build the products and services and systems that even just curb that flow but ideally reverse it

then I think everyone will be better served right because you'll see incentives aligned differently and you'll see people make choices that are actually good for people rather than you know the bottom line or whatever I think we're starting to see this a bit with brave it hasn't all like come together but when I talk about sort of realigning incentives and redistributing the power that's probably one of the most interesting and exciting things that's happening in the space right now because it is flipping a lot of the natural structures and the natural flows of power and money literally on his hat from the traditional way of doing things so basically your hope for the future of

blockchain is that it will empower individuals other things that you think could reasonably happen that you're afraid of my biggest fear is we end up building the exact same systems we have except that now it's all on a transparent blockchain so we're more usually exploited like oops there are some aspects of the blockchain that you know it's valuable that you can have a transparent ledger it's valuable that anyone can verify the record is powerful that you can use that record to ensure that X company is being transparent and you can hold them accountable or you could use that data to you know collect a very vast pile of financial data on every person in the world and then you

know manipulating them into your doing your bidding or things like that that we have to be very careful and and sort of very aware of what the technical features of the blockchain are and then what the sort of human features are or the human values because the blockchain is not empowering like the blockchain is transparent and that transparency can be exploited or it can be valuable it's only how we the builders and the users and the people that are in here doing this stuff building the space is how we choose to use the blockchain that matters so how does my crypto fit in there where do you hope to be in say five years time

that is something that I think about a lot we talked about a lot I'm so used to solving problems right like I'm so used to like seeing a problem and identifying that problem and solving it I know that we want to keep doing that the question is you know what are the biggest problems that people are gonna have and are the problems that people have are they aligned with sort of our bigger vision for what we want the blockchain to be because as we all know getting into the space and holding your own funds and remaining secure these are all hard problems to solve one way to solve them is just you know have a custodian hold them for you there's a lot of grappling there's a lot of conflict what

I want I guess my crypto to be is is the thing that allows people to get into the space successfully with confidence to understand why they're here and to do whatever the hell the blockchain empowers them to do at that point in time whether that's you know a payment layer or an ICL or the next Dow or whatever it is that's most valuable to them that's where I want to be you know there will be lots of people listening this podcast were working in the blockchain space so maybe interested in working in the blockchain space and you know he kind of talked about the good place where you could go or maybe not so a good place are there some

problems that you feel maybe that were beyond the scope of my crypto that you know you wish people really worked on and tackle so that it ends up going in a good direction I would say that everything around privacy is something that's a bit beyond like we can do our part but the deep layer one infrastructure privacy solutions for aetherium those are going to be huge because you know as I just mentioned the blockchain is transparent and that transparency can be valuable or it can be abusive there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with CK snarks there's a lot of interesting stuff going on with mixers there's a lot of interesting research being done I'm super interested in

seeing how this plays out so that people can to have the ability to not just you know necessarily send a single transaction you know anonymously or privately but that you can like when you start up a new account or you start up a new identity or you spin up this thing that's going to interact with this DAP or this game that needs to be completely separate from your last identity because otherwise we could just all use one hat just forever and everything would be fine but you know especially as tops of all I think that it's gonna be more and more important that you have separate isolated little areas for you to do your interactions otherwise you know the comprehensive profile that people can collect that anyone can collect about

you is gonna be huge and the value of that is so huge that it will be exploited like this you can't not exploit that I mean I won't exploit that but that data is immensely valuable your fear that probably the worst outcome is to create some sort of perfect surveillance machinery well Taylor thanks so much for coming on I was be super awesome to talk with you and like to learn a little bit about you and your history and my crypto and all the fantastic work you're doing so yeah thanks so much thank you for having me and this is um super fun to talk to you and share all these stories of my life and of course we'll have links to you do

it beta things so people can check that out and the main mine crypto and yeah so hopefully those who haven't checked it out yet will have a look at their products definitely check out that beta beta got my crypto column if you find any like little weirdness or future things that aren't quite right like find us anywhere on social media or email and tell me all about it because yeah we're at that point now we're putting like the polish on and making sure that it's actually useful and valuable to people so I need you to tell me what's wrong with it okay cool then thanks so much sure awesome thank you yes thank you for joining us on this week's episode we

release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever your listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the epicenter podcast go to epicenter TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on Twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes it helps to be behind the show and we're always happy to read them well thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music] [Music]