Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Taylor Monahan: From Side Project to Center Stage – The Story of MyEtherWallet & MyCrypto

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

Many people find that the crypto-finance space is quite difficult for non-technical people to understand and interact with the technologies. Some projects and people have made tremendous progress in creating tools and interfaces that allow a broader audience to participate, speculate, and learn.Taylor Monahan started MyEtherWallet as a side project in 2015, only for it to grow into one of the significant pieces of software people used to participate in the 2017 ICO boom. She has since "design-forked" the codebase and created MyCrypto, an open-source tool for generating ether wallets, handling ERC-20 tokens, and interacting with the blockchain with a clean and intuitive design.Topics covered in this episode:Taylor's background, and how she got into cryptocurrencyWhat her experience was with Ethereum so early in the projects lifecycleHow Reddit comments helped guide the feature list in the early days of MyEtherWalletHow the DAO hack got her working full time on MyEtherWalletBuilding a project before “founding a company”Experiencing the ICO boom as the main wallet used to participate in token generation eventsWhere MyCrypto is at todayHow Taylor wants MyCrypto to change the user experience in cryptocurrencyTaylor’s view on centralized exchanges and view of the futureEpisode links:MyCrypto Beta#MyCryptoWinter is back! (Medium)Try The New MyCrypto! (Medium)MyCrypto TwitterMyCrypto GitHubMyCrypto DiscordTaylor Monahan TwitterSponsors:Cosmos: Compete to win 100,000 ATOM by building and running Cosmos Zones - https://cosmos.network/goz/eToro: Automatically copy every trade of eToro's top crypto traders at the exact price in real-time - https://www.etoro.com/Pepo: -This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/317

This is Epicenter, episode 317 with guest, Taylor Monaghan. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Kujo. Today our guest is Taylor Monaghan. 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. 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 Ethereum went through, most notably, the ICO boom of 2016 and 2017. She also tells the story of how her and her or 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 Ethereum 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,

the kind of throwback conversations. It's interesting to take a step back and learn from the lessons of previous market cycles. Felica and Brian did this interview, 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 our brand new sponsor, Pepo. If you haven't heard of Pepo, the way I describe it is it's a cross between TikTok, Twitter, and Steam It. TikTok because the way you interact with people is through 30-second videos.

Twitter because the kind of content you'll find there very much resembles 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 like. And you can use this cryptocurrency, which is called pepoccoins, to buy gift cards at a bunch of different merchants. So like Amazon and Uber E's Starbucks and there's a whole bunch of different ones there. So it's actually quite useful.

So I've been using Pepo 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 the podcast next year? And people have been answering and there's lots of great suggestions there. So if you want to tell me, let me know who you think we should have on the podcast. Go to pepo.com, download it for iOS and Android, and you can follow me. It's the same username as on Twitter, Seb 2.0, Seb 2, P-O-I-N-T-0. And let me know who we should have on the show next year. We'd like to thank Pepo for their support of the podcast. We're also brought to you by E-Turo. Now, if you're interested in getting into the financial markets, stocks, bonds, indices, commodities, ETFs, or even crypto, and you don't know where to start building your portfolio, Eatoro's copy trader feature is the best way to get started. The way this works is when you create

your account in Eitoro, you'll be presented with Eitoro's top traders. These are people that have spent lots of time researching the market, developing their strategies, and building their portfolio. And you can copy these people's trades and whatever profits they make, you will also make the same profits proportional to your investment. What I also like about Ituro is that they give you the risk profile for each of the traders you copy. So you can start building your own strategies on top of copy trader investing certain amounts with low risk, medium risk or high risk traders based on your own risk profile. So you really end up learning quite a bit about the markets by copying other people that have done all the research for you. So to check out E-Toro and start trading, go to etoro.com.

You are O.com. Create your account, and you can get started today. Now, this is not investment advice. It's my own personal opinion. You should always be aware of the risks that you take while investing, and specifically with cryptocurrencies because they involve a lot of risk. And we'd like to thank E-Turo for the support of the podcast. We're also brought to you by Cosmos, the internet of blockchains.

And as I mentioned last week, the Cosmos Hub is upgrading from Hub 2 to Hub 3, and there's a number of governance proposals that are going to be integrated in this new hub. Now, if you're an atom holder, there isn't necessarily anything that 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 going to be passed in this hard fork are the following. The community pool is now active, so governance will be able to spend funds from the community pool.

there's a change 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. So 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 at cosmos. 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 testnet

challenge, which is being set up by the Cosmos team in preparation for the deployment of IBC. We'd like to thank Cosmos for those support of the podcast. And with that, here's our interview with Taylor Monaghan. So we're here today with Taylor Monaghan. She's the founder and the CEO of My Crypto, which is, you know, one of the most. popular Ethereum wallets that probably many users have used or perhaps my ether, which is a similar product with sort of the same background in history and we'll get into a little bit

the details here. And she's also been very outspoken on many topics such as like usability and 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 in some other interviews. that you were originally you studied film.

Tell us about that. Like, how does one go from film to, you know, running a crypto wallet company? I don't know. I ask myself that question 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 of 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 creating these films that weren't necessarily for school. I was kind of over the like going to classes and doing homework thing. And I did that 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 grow up a lot and I certainly did. But it was also an interesting time just in terms 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 drop out, 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 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 quickly realized that, you know, the skills that I had learned and the things I'd 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. I'm curious, where does that entrepreneurial drive of years 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 had 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 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 empathize 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 do whatever it was that made me happy. They were never like, don't go to film school, get a real job. They were never like, that's a terrible decision.

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 building homepages. Is that so? Yeah. Essentially, I was, you know, I was updating the website. So, you know, 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 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 the CS students have, but you have a lot more

knowledge about how these things are sort of used and put in a practice. And you realize that at the end of the day, yes, having sort of like the best code or the prettiest code or the most elegant code is really nice. It makes things more maintainable in the long term. But if you don't have a 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 not going to matter how pretty the code is. Yeah, I see. So what's the first time that you heard of crypto or blockchain? 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 Gawks 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 mashables and the Gizmodos 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 Gawks 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 of that time, I also kind of discovered Bitcoin around a similar time, which I think it was maybe like May 2013. And the thing is, to me, it made so much sense Bitcoin. And I was convinced that everybody was going to start to like recognize the same thing and everybody was going to 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 increase. and people started getting into it.

And I was like, okay, it's obviously happening now. And like, everybody's soon going to be using Bitcoin. And then when it crashed, when it sort of like Mount Cox 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 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, I think it was sort of a reckoning for all of us. It was interesting because at that time, Bitcoin was seen as sort of like the next payment layer. You could buy things. And a vendor 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 price crash happened and, you know, the fallout from Mount Gawks, was the way 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 OGs of Bitcoin who were very sort of anarchists. They had very strong philosophies in terms of privacy and 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 as like the next payment layer, you know, and the buy your coffee with Bitcoin, buy everything with Bitcoin. And then you had the get rich quickers 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 Gawks crisis, but we have sort of had a bit of a crisis. of identity, I guess, or reckoning with, hey, are we going to 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 a bit in time, but we should maybe come back to the state today as well. So you have most, or you most known for your work in the Ethereum space. You know, when did you kind of switch your focus from Bitcoin to Ethereum? and, you know, what was your early interactions with Ethereum community? Yeah, in 2014, so during this sort of depression era of Bitcoin, the Ethereum white paper started sort of being, I guess, passed around.

I think that's the best way to put it, just because the way that I first heard about Ethereum and the white paper in Vitalik, the first link I actually clicked was like some YouTube video of 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 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 step. 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, I was just sort of, yeah, I wasn't fully engrossed in it like I had been previously. So I was checking on Ethereum, I was sharing a lot of good things. And, you know, we had amassed a very, very small collection of Bitcoin during this time. And so I think we just, I don't know how much we put into the pre-sale, but we just kind of took some of that pile of Bitcoin that we had collected over time and yeah, and put it in the Ethereum pre-sale. 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 Ethereum launched, it launched without any user interface to manage your funds. You just had like the clients, the nodes, the

command line interface. And literally like I was trying to figure out how, to, you know, move my funds from this pre-sale wallet file that had been emailed to us. And I was like, oh, this is not ideal. Like, this is not going to work. Like, I had used terminal before. Like, I had typed commands in, but there was no way. I was about to move money by typing in commands. And so we literally, yeah, we put together, we did what we had been doing basically for the

previous three years 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 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 pre-sale wallet to that paper wallet. When we first sort of like, quote unquote, launched it, it wasn't my ether wallet. It was just like a thing. It was just this tool that solved 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 Ethereum pre-sale was August 2014 or something. And so then fast forward a year, Ethereum launched in July of 2015. And so during that whole period of time, I was sort of like not really super. I was in and out of the ecosystem.

I was watching sort of what was happening, but I was not sitting there, like, obsessed or 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 Kolesla and me, we worked together in our regular traditional office jobs, building random things for clients, basically whatever clients wanted. And Kolsla is, I guess, like full stack back end.

He's an engineer. He's a real engineer. And I was always like the front end and the product person and the interface between the user and the program that makes things happens. But I was also the interface between like the engineers and the C levels at the company. And I was the interface between the engineers and the client. And so I think that that dynamic, it worked well at the company we were working for. but it also, it worked well sort of for the blockchain space as well because it turned out to be a very similar problems. And so how did you go from, okay, we're building a little tool that's useful to, okay, let's go ahead with this and kind of build a company and, you know, really take it forward as a startup.

So there's never like a decision, I think, to like push it forward. It was, 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 Reddit told us that we should build this feature or that feature or give us feedback. And I think like the early versions, we had an email address in the footer. There was probably like my Etherwell edit Gmail or like even just my email. And we would get 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 I was like one foot in the space and 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, I'd ask Kulsla. I'd be like, I remember one of the, in the very early days, I asked Kostla, I was like, why does everyone else need gas to send ether, but we don't?

And he was like, you do. And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah, it's just hard coded. Like you don't see it. We don't have a field for it. It's just hard coded. And I was like, oh and like shoot I know nothing you know it was 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 so when ethereum launched like you had like proof of stake was like the hottest thing like everyone wanted it and also this sort of concept of like everything would be abstracted away into contracts at some point. Yeah, we are still waiting for that. Right? Like everything would be a contract. Yeah, we are. So really,

like during this time, like I assume that like contracts would take over and that we wouldn't be able to keep up. And I assume that MIST would launch and we wouldn't, you know, be needed anymore. And so it was 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 tour that lets people interact with money or values so blatantly? I mean, we all had to wisen up from a legal perspective at some point. When did that happen for you guys? So my biggest concern, the first sort of quote-unquote 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 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 derive 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 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 forced or be hacked down the road. And so that was my biggest concern was like, how can we not do that? I was even still

same 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 Nelly, like messaging goals being like, hey, I saw you change this line of code that has no potential to screw anything up, right? That's exactly what your program is like hearing. Yeah, exactly. So you'd be like, yeah, no, that's not, it's not anywhere near that, Taylor. Like, what are you even talking about? But I think that that paranoia, yeah, 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 over-anxious 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, Ethereum started kind of taking off, no, and there's 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 joined 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 two, 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 when the Dow 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 the mentality of the Dow, the entire sort of ecosystem, the entire community was like sitting in the Dow Slack. Griff was like inspired. inspirational, right? Like you just, you can't help but be happy around him and be inspired and believe that the world's going to 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 and Ethereum 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. Yeah, it was very much ahead of its time. But 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's a whole new set of problems to solve, right? Because there was technical things that needed to be overcome in order to like interact with the DAO or buy your DAO tokens or whatever. But there was also like this very human problem

where when you're voting for something, you can be very easily influenced. And since votes and the outcome of vote is often like a zero sum outcome, a little influence can go a long way. Yeah, I did a lot of research on voting and interfaces and stuff when the DAO was going on because I found it fascinating. How did your sentiment 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, fuck, we were, not that we were right, but so I had had a conversation with Stefan Twal.

We had had had on a phone call to talk about something maybe like three days before it was hacked. And it had gotten big, right? Like, 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 shit 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 it's dominating the ecosystem it's no longer this this experiment to see you know if we can more efficiently allocate capital and if it if it goes down you know that that could be like a

Mount Cox type crisis. And I knew it, right? Like, I knew he was right. And I was, I was worried. And then when it happened, it was like, yeah, it's in your bones. You're just like, oh, my God, it's happening. But I immediately went into problem solving mode, right? Like, a lot of people, especially the people that heard about the Dow hack immediately, like sent all of their Dow tokens to 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, like very much so, the worst in 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 Kosoal ended up going separate paths. And then, you know, kind of my crypto emerged from that. And, you know, my ether wallet 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 was no company even at all. No, there was nothing. It was just, it was like me and Coleslaw on hangouts talking. And yeah. And at some point my dad found out that there was not an LLC and he's like, no, you're idiots. You are, you are 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 are they going to get if they sue me you know but I set up we set up to LLC but you know in that context the LLC was set up to have an LLC the LLC was not set up to ensure that Kocela 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 Dow period and the split, Ethereum went from, I mean, price-wise it went from like $10 to $1,200. My Etherwall became like the de facto way to interact with Ethereum. It was the way to get into ICOs. 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, our, we would like our support inbox didn't even have,

like they don't have 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, 500 or 1,000 emails a day. And like we would hit that because we were, we would get a thousand tickets and maybe 90% of them the answer was, hey, here's how you can 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 had like a standard 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, Kolsla and I, nobody would ever ask us what we wanted out of my ether wallet. And I don't think we ever ask ourselves either. And so how I react to situations where people rely on me is 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 stress and dealing with pressure. Menculsal 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 broke down.

And then lawyers got involved. And once the lawyers were involved, like everything's hopeless. It's all a waste from there. 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 ICOs and like

all the crazy things that were happening in the space and like there were hackers going after us and fishing was a thing and it was a crazy period it was just insane but I talked to so many different law firms and lawyers and a lawyer's 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 the court says, like, you're right, you win. And that's going to be like a year or two years from now. I'm going to 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 a long time. I looked at like what it was Taylor want. 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 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 be a void, you know, where I'm like, you know what, screw this. Like, it's not worth it. Let's just walk away. I was so scared that that was a real possibility and that in doing so the, like, the fishing, like the fissures and the scammers and the hackers and all the malicious actors that are, you know, just that flood the crypto space, 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 brand and the domain name that was my ether wallet. You know, my ether wallet 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 a net win. And I actually think that looking back, everyone has won, right? So at that point in time, my ether wallet did. 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 affiliate programs with the hardware wallets. and we have the swap functionality, which gives us a kickback. We had Viet 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 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 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, a little bit chaotic, improvising world to like, you know, running a proper a proper startup and yeah

and I think you raised to BC money afterwards as well at some point yeah so 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 ether wallet like I did completely taken over my life and I started hiring people

and there were all there were all these problems and none of the problems that I was encountering like I did not have any idea how to solve any of them. I didn't know how to manage people. I didn't know how to, I didn't know anything. I literally, I knew nothing.

You know, my dad, I was talking to him one day and he was like, well, 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 my ether wallet, I had a number of relationships with really smart people in the ecosystem and a few relationships with investors, but not as investors. Like they also, investors also bought into the Dow, if you guys didn't know, you know what I mean?

So I went up to ASAF and I sat down with Brayton and Adam from BoostVC, who I had talked to a few times previously. And I sat down with Olaf, who was at Polychain, had started Polychain 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, about like contracts and things that can go wrong and risk and product 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 Olaf had called. We were texting one night, and he had 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 going to be sustainable when we go through another market cycle, 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 your business model is and see what you can do to survive, you know, the next couple of years that are going to 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 going to be, it's going to keep being like this. And no, it was not going to keep being like that. We were going to 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 A round just because of the point that we were at at the company, even though the company had 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. Congratulations. It's such an awesome story and well done. Yeah, let's not over yet. We'll see what happens. So tell us where you currently at or where the product is currently at. So what does the My Crypto 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 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 didn't want to do this whole private keys and keystery files and mnemonic phrases, like all 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 website 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 had 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 not been written for the long term. So we rewrote everything using React and we, like, wrote documentation, and we thought about the architecture 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 desk, 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 want My crypto to be able to do is I want it to transform from being this tool and this 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.com myripto.com 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 wallet your ledger your metamask 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 oh transaction history so you can see the transactions for all of your accounts, all on this dashboard. 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 we're used to when we're using products that are fun and that are useful and that are enjoyable to use. What do you think is the biggest thing that these changes will, in what way will it improve the user experience or wants 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 ICOs 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 doubt 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 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% and not there everything is red and everything is a bloodbath But the reality is that the tokens, not all the tokens, but the tokens that do actually have utility or will have utility or do have value, those are going to be the drivers of the Ethereum ecosystem. And someone needs to tell people what the frick they can do with them at some point.

So does the dashboard facilitate native debt interaction? Yeah. So one thing that we're going to 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 DAPS and interactions so that not only can we build little interaction layers, little micro-interactions to say like lend your tokens or lend your ETH for on compound and gain interest, but other people, since we're 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 going to want to see their pie graphs and their increases and all the money numbers, right? Where if people are super into all the DFI stuff that's happening today, they're going to want to see, yeah, how's that CDP doing, how, you know, what's going on with compound, all of these different layers. The other interesting thing is that, and I 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, right? The code knows what you, like what tokens you hold. And it,

you can write code to determine what any user has or holds or whatever, right? And if we were Google or Facebook, we would just take all that information and hold. hoard 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 ETH 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 message 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 years? users my crypto has, like how many transactions they send, what kind of like value is held in those apps? So is that data that you don't 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 work. 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 that needed last month, the server is going to cost you way more. And so we have sort of those sort of stats. We've had some short-lived like counters on like how many transactions get sent through our node, that 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 Ethereum space, right? that 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 things that they're doing are deliberate actions. Rather than in 2017, it was like everyone was just running around like a chicken with their head got 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 can you do right now with your ether? Right? Like where can you get value? And DFI is obviously one of the most exciting things, but it's also sort of an infrastructure layer. It's lending your eth is not something to write home about or it's not like an ICO. It's not one of those hyped up things. It's like a default state, I would say. Yeah, money 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 is this just a stepping stone? I think it's a stepping stone. The reason I'm such an advocate of hardware wallets 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 harder wallet 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. There also, the sort of interaction layer is still like this layer one. right. We're still talking about keys. We're still talking about signing a 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, 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 Ethereum and, you know, it will all be sort of distracted 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 a DAP, or if you're solving a different problem than 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 the user gets out of it, right? Like, they should land on the DAP not to buy a token and send it. Like, they should land on the DAP because they want to get that decentralized Uber or that

to centralize Airbnb or play that game. Yeah, I'm not interact with the blockchain. It 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, okay, 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 amassed, you know, enormous power, gigantic resources.

You know, they're increasingly doing more things too, right? Besides just trading, you know, you have like futures and derivatives. Now exchanges are starting to do staking. Spoken with exchanges, they want to maybe offer access to like defy products and and do like so many different things. How do you look at that? Do you think we are moving more towards crypto assets being customers? Adit, 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 at 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 a direct investment into an ICO smart contract. We had that. We had all of these people that were not only using our product, but also using our product for exactly what the blockchain was built for. But they didn't know that. They just knew that they were going to get rich. I think that we do have to get out of our ad explaining why the blockchain is different and what value that adds and what the competitive advantages are. Because at the end of the day, like, we're very close to having the quote-unquote blockchain become just another word. And it probably already has, but it still holds meaning for me at least. 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 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 Coinbase over PayPal, Venmo, your bank? If you look at the entire deck space, I mean, there's many decks. 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 on like the OTC and the market maker side of things, which is a side of the industry that I really have

have very little information on. And one of the things that I learned was that with the, Dex is it's not just the volume that sort of increases the spread 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 in 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 in a database somewhere? And it'll be interesting to see how these problems get solved. I definitely do not have the answers, though.

Let's say it happens that way. And, you know, your dreams for how the blockchain space turns out and for the change it brings to the world, you know, all come through. 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 the humans, the me's and the 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, in 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. be better served, right? Because you'll see incentives align 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, 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 its hat from the traditional way of doing things. So basically your hope for the future of blockchain is that it will empower individuals. Are the 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 easily 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. It's 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, manipulate them into doing your bidding or things like that. I think that we have to be very careful 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 talk 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 going to 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 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 ICO 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 to this podcast, working in the blockchain space, so maybe interested in working in the blockchain space. And, you know, you kind of talked about the good place where you could go or maybe not so good place. Are there some problems that you feel, maybe that are beyond the scope of my crypto that, you know, you wish people really worked on and tackled so that it ends up going in a good direction? I would see 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 Ethereum, 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 ZK Sarks. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on with mixers. 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 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 address forever and everything would be fine. But, you know, especially as gaps evolve, I think that it's going to 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 going to be huge. And the value of that is so huge that it will be exploited. Like, 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 it would 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 either 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, we'll have a look at their products. Definitely check out that beta, beta.com. If you find any, like, little weirdness or feature 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, hey. Awesome. Thank you guys. 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 you 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. And while you're 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 people find the show, and we're always happy to read them. So thanks so much, and we look forward to being back next week.