Unchained - MyCrypto's Taylor Monahan on Why She's Not a Fan of ICOs

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

The cofounder of MyEtherWallet and CEO of newly launched MyCrypto walks us through the nuts and bolts of how MyCrypto works, how it differs from a company like Coinbase, why the keys you get from the site even enable to work offline -- and how the company makes money. She also describes how the crypto community changed in 2017, her crazy sleeping schedule during that year, and how she responds when users ask questions like whether or not an initial coin offering will really deliver on the returns promised. We also cover what it's like being a CEO when running a company was never in her game plan, how she got into crypto after starting off in film school and what her tips are for not losing your crypto. https://mycrypto.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, the podcast where we hear from innovators, pioneers, and thought leaders in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. I'm your host, Laura Shin, an independent journalist covering all things crypto. If you love Unchained, be sure to let the world know with a review on Apple Podcasts. Those reviews help new listeners find out about the show. Also, spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Telegram, and wherever you discuss crypto. And don't forget to follow me on Twitter at Laura. This episode is brought to you by StartEngine, an ICO platform focused on issuing securities, tokens, in compliance with SEC rules. StartEngine can help your business launch a regulated ICO. Go to startengin.com slash Unchained for a 20% discount. StartEngine does not provide legal advice. Today's guest is Taylor Monaghan, CEO of MyCrypto.com and co-founder of My Ether Wallet. Welcome, Taylor. Thank you so much for having me, Laura. Let's start talking about both my ether wallet and my crypto. Since you recently left my ether wallet to start my crypto, what does my ether wallet do?

And how does my crypto differ from my ether wallet? That is an excellent question, Laura. So we have to kind of go back in time a little bit to sort of get the full story of how this evolution occurred. And it really comes down to me as a founder just being completely unprepared for everything. doing things right in like the company structure side of things. So for example, setting up a company, having all the paperwork done and signed, none of those were priorities because we just wanted to build a product. So over the past, you know, about six months, so the end of 2016, or sorry, the end of 2017,

beginning of 2018, we really wanted to, frankly, get our shit together and make sure that, you know, the company, the team, everything was really put together in a solid manner. And the reality was that nothing was set up right. So a lot of the differences between my ether wallet and my crypto are actually things that the end user doesn't care about at all. They are things that give us security. They are things that give us the legal standing to be protected. There are things like we can now have bank accounts and potentially do stock options for employees

and have real employees. And all of these things that were limited beforehand. You know, in terms of from a product standpoint and the things that users might actually care about, with My Crypto, we're really looking to just go full seam ahead and deliver not only the way, web interface that we have right now, which is very, very similar to my Ether wallet, but desktop apps, mobile apps, just enhanced security, enhanced deploy systems,

a whole bunch of really fancy stuff that make the user experience better and hopefully help cut down on some of the fishing issues that we've encountered over the last two years, pretty much. And so just for people who aren't really even familiar with the product at all, when you were talking about, like, the web interface and stuff, so what is it that you do? on my Etherwallet or my crypto, what is it that somebody can do on that site? Absolutely. So we're basically this interface that interacts directly with the Ethereum blockchain.

And so instead of, you know, I compare to like Coinbase just because they're really well-known name. But when you're using Coinbase, you go to Coinbase.com. You can log in with your username and your password. And then you can do things like buy Bitcoin or sell Bitcoin. you can look at your balances, you can look at your transaction history, all of these things. And so with my crypto, you can do similar things, but instead of using Coinbase's back end or any hosted wallet's backend, you're actually interacting directly with the blockchain. And this is really, really key because it means that you are in control.

So you're in control of your keys. And while Coinbase is really legitimate and they have a great team, they have great leadership. they have great vision. A lot of these other exchanges that are holding your funds and holding your keys for you, they may not be as reputable. And we hear about these hacks in the space all the time, and it's such a disappointment. And so that's really the benefit of My Crypto is that you can be in control and you can control, you know, when you send your money.

You don't have a third party deciding whether or not you can send it, when you can send it. And then obviously there's no risk of a third party being hacked and their entire hot wallet being drained. Like we've seen so many times before. So then I like this comparison that you're or this contrast that you drew with Coinbase. So essentially when I create an address on my crypto, what is that doing exactly? Because like I know for instance that I can even use my crypto or my Ether wallet offline. So what is happening exactly? Right.

So the way that the blockchain works and cryptography works is you have these private keys and these public keys. And together, they're called like a key pair. And every private key has this corresponding public key. And the public key is your address. So that's that string of characters. With Ethereum, it starts with zero X and then it's about 40 characters long. And this is just simply how cryptography works. This is how your SSL certs work.

This is how a lot of the infrastructure of the internet revolves around this cryptography. We're just kind of putting it into this financial means. And so with my crypto, when you go and you're creating an address, what you're doing is you're deriving this key pair. And the hardest part about that is just truly randomly generating this key pair for you. And then you take that and you decide to use it. It's actually quite simple relative to say, Facebook or Gmail or Coinbase where you have a user account, you have a user email, you have information that's tied to that account, whether it be addresses or your credit card number or

your email address or whatever these pieces of information is. With MyCryptu, you just go and we're going to handle all the hard math and the cryptography for you, and we're just going to give you that address. And that's just, it's all cryptography. This is all just based on really fancy math. It's not based on like a server-side authentication like you have with Gmail or Facebook or Coinbase even. And so when we say, you know, you can generate a wallet offline or you can send offline, as long as you know what type of math is being used, it doesn't matter if you're online or offline because you don't need to go access a server somewhere and you don't need to go check with it. You just know that as long as everyone's doing the same math problem, they're going to get to

the same answer. And so that's really, it's really quite remarkable how it all works. And it's just, it's really different. I think that's the best word for it. It's really different from, say, you know, your traditional login systems with, with Gmail and Facebook and Coinbase. So essentially what's happening when I go on there is that the service is creating a pair of keys for me, one public and one private. Is that correct on the Ethereum blockchain? Right, exactly. And then really what you're doing is you're simply deciding that you're going to use this key pair. Like you've decided, this is my address. And so these key pairs are totally randomly generated. There's about a bazillion of them that you could choose from. And you're just saying, hey, this is mine.

I'm going to use this moving forward. And that's it. Okay. And then when I create a password on there, what exactly is that doing? So the password is encrypting the private key. And the reason that we encrypt it for you is because this single piece of information is essentially controlling either hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars or potentially millions of dollars. And so by encrypting it, we just put another layer of protection on top of the private key. So that ideally, let's say you store it somewhere a little bit insecurely, someone gets their hands on it. Ideally, they'd also need that password and they wouldn't have it. So they couldn't steal your money. That's obviously in an ideal world.

So I also know that it's possible for me to connect my my crypto address or my ether wallet address to say ledger or Metamask or some other service. So what does that mean at that moment? Like does it mean that I have in essence sort of like two private keys to access the same funds? Sort of. So when you're using Metamask or Ledger or Trezer, essentially instead of using a private key that you generated, on My Crypto, you're actually using this private key that's stored in this external place. And it's one of the reasons that we love hardware wallet so much is that they essentially have this private key on the hardware device itself. And it's not on your computer. It's not on your

cell phone. It's on this dedicated device. And so you still have one private key. And it still has, well, in the case of ledger, you have like multiple addresses. But there's still like one core private key. And then you can then, what ends up happening is that My Crypto talks to the ledger and they communicate back and forth. But at no point is the actual private key, this very, very important piece of information, ever sent to My Crypto or even your computer. And that's why we love hardware devices so much.

It's this worry-free device that you can just use if you go to like a fishing website or if you, you know, get like a key logger on your computer or something terrible like that, your funds are still safe because the funds are stored on the blockchain and then the device is storing your access to those funds. So the MyCrypto address sort of enables me to interact in a web environment, but with funds that are maybe contained offline. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, essentially. It's a bit complicated. And because there's nothing in this world like it, it's really, it's quite hard to explain.

And I haven't gotten, you know, the best at it. But because, how do I say this? So because you have this hardware device and the hardware device contains this one piece of really, really important information, which is your private key, it can communicate with My Crypto or another interface. And without sending the private key itself, it can send the data that you, you can, need. So whether that's your account balance, whether that's your address, or whether that's the fact that you want to send this transaction. So, you know, I want to send one-eath to this address. The ledger can handle all of that. And then we will just communicate just the public information out to the world so that your transactions actually broadcast and you send your funds. Okay, so let's go back to when you first started my EtherW wallet.

What were the options out there for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain all the way back then? So back then it was just Gath, which is the Go Ethereum client. And then there was a C++ client. And that was it. And these are both command line interfaces, meaning that you had to like open terminal and type in commands in order to generate a new wallet, send your funds from one place to another, et cetera. And so that's really, you know, the tool that we built was really just a response to the lack of graphical interfaces out there. It wasn't, you know, we didn't plan on this becoming this huge company. We didn't plan on this,

you know, kind of taking over our lives in the way it has. We really just, you know, we're like, hey, I want buttons. Other people probably want buttons to let's make a simple interface with buttons. And so I think that sort of gets to your personal story, which is pretty interesting to me. You started out in film school, which isn't really the typical background for someone in your position now. So how did you end up getting into crypto and founding my ether wallet? Yeah, it's definitely been a remarkable journey. You know, my mom has always said that I kind of find my own path in life and I never take the easy path. So, you know, You know, as you said, I did go to film school.

I eventually dropped out of film school. And her was basically just looking for anything interesting, literally anything interesting to do. And this was, this was in like 2010. And so the economy just wasn't the greatest. Like we were still recovering from the recession, especially for like a liberal art school dropout. The world was not. I was pretty convinced that I was going to be like a broke college job out for the rest of my life. And so what I did was, you know, I found a job that enabled me to utilize my skills that I had learned in film school.

And then I just basically expanded my skills as much as I could in order to try not to be fired. Like really, that was my goal. So it was for this company called the Merichip, they do like a lot of ad tech stuff. We work with a lot of like Fortune 500 companies. it was a really cool job with a really diverse set of projects. And that's also like during that period of time is when I learned about cryptocurrencies just because I was soaking up all the knowledge I could and just really trying to do anything remarkable. I was so like in general, I was just bored and wanted to do anything that was, you know,

about creating and telling stories and helping people. That's what I've always been about. So that's, yeah, that's how that got started. Well, so first, so two questions. Why did you drop out of film school and then how did you even learn about crypto in the first place? So I dropped out of film school because as much as I enjoyed making movies, a lot of film school is not actually about, you know, hands on work. It's about, for example, the semester I dropped out, I was taking a class called Italian cinema in the 19th century. and it was a six-hour class that you just learned about Italian cinema. And I just was not, I was not about that. I wanted to create things.

So I dropped out in order to really focus on just creating rather than these classes. And I honestly, I assumed that I would go back at some point. And then when I, you know, got my first job and started, you know, working and seeing sort of how the real world operates. Because college world, college jobs, college world, that's a whole different, you. you know, environment to be in. And so when I started working, I found that, okay, people actually need problems being, you know, solved, like actually being solved. And people have, you know, different needs and different desires. And you can create things, whether it's film or a simple website or, you know, some marketing piece. And that'll adjust their needs and that'll adjust their

goals that'll adjust, you know, whether it's something that is lacking or a new product that they're launching or whatever it was. And I found that really interesting. And I found it satisfied my same, like, wanting to tell the story that I really enjoyed in film school, but in a much more like real world tangible sense. So it was during that time that I really, I think it was probably like a mashable article that I read about Bitcoin and I just got intrigued. And I think everyone's story is about the same from there, but you fall down this rabbit hole of just like seeing the possibilities open up in front of you and seeing all the different things that, you know, this could change the world or these could change these inefficiencies or whatever it was. And it was just,

I was so drawn to that. I was just my imagination was completely captured. I was, I was down that rabbit hole pretty fast. And do you remember when you read that? So I remember that we started like reading about Bitcoin and really like me and a couple close friends started sharing information as it was going up to that 1,200. So that first Bitcoin bubble. But we didn't buy any until it started going down. So it was definitely not the most ideal time to get into Bitcoin. But it was definitely a good learning experience.

So it sounds like that was late 2013, early 2014? I believe so. It was, yeah, it was right during the initial Bitcoin bubble. And so we ended up getting into it on the way up. And then we were buying on the way down, which obviously is not the ideal way to do things, but was a really great learning experience. And then what were you trying to do on the Ethereum blockchain in 2015 that got you, you know, just start my Ether wallet.

So we had participated in the Ethereum pre-sale. And so honestly, we weren't trying to do anything fancy. We just wanted to safely store our ether somewhere. And so we created this little tool that would just allow us to do that without having to trust my personal abilities using Command Line. That was really the only goal. It was like, okay, we're going to take a really simple problem. We're going to make a really simple solution.

that way I don't have to type in commands to move this ether around, which is a good thing, and then we'll go from there. And honestly, it was really that simple. And it wasn't until, so that was like mid-2015. It wasn't until during 2016 that everything sort of changed and things started getting a little bit more serious. So the Dow happened. The Dow got hacked.

The hard fork happened. All these different things happened. And we just kept iterating and responding to feedback. That was just, that was it. It was just, you know, people needed stuff. We built stuff. That was it. And so you keep saying we.

Who is we? So the original two of us is his name's Kolsala. He goes by the username KVH Nuke. It was me and him and that's it. All the way through, God, almost all the way to the end of 2016. And then when stuff started getting kind of really hectic, my husband jumped in and started helping out as kind of like a life raft more than anything else, just trying to keep us afloat.

And then during 2017, when stuff got really, really rough, that's when KVH nuke, you know, there's always sort of a breaking point, if you want to call it, or a turning point. And for him, it was during this ICU madness that, you know, for one reason or another, you know, things started breaking down in our communication, in our partnership. And I really can't, you know, I'm not, I can't really like put words into his mouth or like, you know, say what he was thinking or what he was feeling. But I can say for me personally, during these crazy ICU times in mid-2017, it was probably one of the most stressful periods of my life.

And just, you know, everything was being thrown at us. And we're kind of like responsible for an immense amount of money being moved around, whether or not, you know, that was actually, you know, we don't hold people's keys. We're not actually sending the money. We're just enabling people to do this. But people don't see it that way. So we still take the blame. So there's a lot of different factors that went into it.

But it was about in June or July that he kind of tapped out. And you'll have to, you know, ask him exactly why that was. but it was definitely a stressful, stressful time. And so you sort of alluded to this, but, you know, as we all have seen, 2017 was a breakout year for crypto, probably the biggest year in the history of the space, and the craze took off super fast, but we got some inklings of how quickly things could take off in 2016. And my ether wallet was really one of the main entities in the center of the whole storm. So can you just describe for me,

how crypto seemed to change both across 2016 and 2017 from the vantage point that you had. With Amex Platinum, almost every purchase made with your card can be covered with points, including new tastes, new fits, and virtually everything in between. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. When McDonald's partnered with Frank's Redhot, they said they could put that shit on everything. So that's exactly what McDonald's did. Put it on your McChrispy.

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I mean, it was, the best way I can describe it is just kind of like, we approached everything as whatever fire is the biggest and the closest to put that one out. So instead of thinking about the long term, instead of thinking about the potential of the blockchain, you know, in 2019, 2020, in 10 years, whatever it is, everyone's attitudes was really short term and ours included. And I think that that's really one of the biggest shifts that we saw. was just how fast this all happened. And once it gets going and once that momentum gets going,

there's no way that you can stop it. And part of that is due to, you know, that there really is real potential for the blockchain, right? Like there is remarkable things that people can build and it can enable a lot of remarkable things. Another part of it is that, you know, a lot of what we're seeing these days, even today, is highly speculative.

And so people, you know, when they're speculating on things and they all get going, that's called the bubble. And that's sort of what we're seeing. And for us, you know, we're not big fans of the price shooting up quickly because it means that everything else shoots up quickly too. And what do you mean by that? Everything else. What else?

I mean, like support tickets shoot up. The servers go down. So therefore the amount of time it takes to maintain the servers goes up. Just, you know, every time the price goes up, I think we're like, oh, God, okay, like, what's going wrong? Where, you know, how can we fix it? What do we need to address? Who do we need to hire? That kind of stuff.

We're not, it's not super enjoyable anymore, to be honest. And so over that time period, how would you say the people interested in the crypto space changed? It was, I would call it more diverse. I wouldn't say that the people entering the space were like any one specific type of person. But what we had seen up until that point was like really highly technical people that were really interested in the technology, interested in the space, interested in the potential. Now we had this diverse set of people that were, you know, maybe more speculative, maybe around for the short term. But we also saw people like grandmothers enter this space.

people who, you know, were from the more traditional Wall Street-type world who were interested in the space and the potential of it. And so we definitely weren't prepared for that. I think up until that point, you know, whether I was making user interface choices or copy choices, I was pretty confident in my ability to do so because if I understood it, chances are our users would understand it because, you know, we had similar traits. and during 2017 that all changed. I really, it, it pretty much hit me over the head pretty hard, you know, when I would make like a copy update that I would think like, oh, okay, this is now more clear. And we'd get hundreds of support tickets telling me how wrong I was. And just like, I would just accidentally create this confusion.

And I was like, okay, I'm definitely not. Like, we definitely need more people here. We definitely need to analyze our users. We definitely need to sit back and figure out how we're going to scale this to be maintainable and be a useful tool for everyone, not just these sort of technical people who have already have cryptocurrencies. And what were the kinds of questions you were getting? It was really broad.

So sometimes people have questions about like what is the blockchain or what is a private key. sometimes they're more like how do I get rich or I heard about this ICU and I want to get in help me you know our favorite questions are definitely ones that we can take some time answering and it's going to like it's because you actually care and you actually want to know what's going on with this crazy cryptography or the blockchain or whatever our least favorite ones are when people ask us like they email support and they're asking us to speculate on the markets which happens really frequently actually. Like, meaning asking you for which coins are the next hot coins and stuff like that? Yeah, exactly. So whether or not we think that this ICO will show the returns

that that ICO is promising or, you know, do you think X, Y, and Z would be the next ether? Those types of questions. I mean, do you, would you even respond to those? Well, we have a policy that we respond to all emails. So we do actually respond to them. But we have, for those types of questions, we don't actually answer the question, obviously. Like, we don't tell them, like, yes, this is going to be the next Ethereum or something like that. We very graciously, you know, kind of point them to some really awesome resources that we have about investing and good choices and due diligence and those types of things and ask them to be responsible regardless. of the investment choices that they choose to make. Okay.

We're going to finish discussing crypto's crazy year in 2017. Also talking about tips for not losing your crypto and more. But first, I'd like to take a quick break to tell you about our fabulous sponsor, StartEngine. Interested in raising capital through a regulated ICO, Start Engine is your one-stop solution. Start Engine, an ICO platform with 140,000 plus investors, was founded in 2014 by Howard Marks, co-founder of Activision Blizzard. Start Engine's mission is to help entrepreneurship. entrepreneurs raise the capital they need to succeed. Since the implementation of the Jobs Act in 2016,

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StartEngan does not provide legal advice. Potential sponsors. This ad spot could be yours. If you or your company is interested in sponsoring Unchained, please send an email to Laura Shin Podcast at gmail.com. That's L-A-U-R-A-S-H-I-N podcast at gmail.com. My guest today is Taylor Monaghan, CEO of MyCripto.com. So how much in transactions was my EtherWallet doing at various times over the year? So we have very little analytics just because so much of our user base is really privacy-minded.

And we frankly don't really want that information. We do have some transaction counts. meaning that we just like know how much, how many transactions we're going through our nodes. But one of the awesome things about my crypto is that you can actually send, you can send a transaction through our nodes or other infrastructure like Infura and EtherScan and Giveth. So essentially, even if our nodes were to be offline, you have these other points of infrastructure, these other API endpoints that you can interact with. So during, okay, so at the beginning.

beginning of 2017, we were sending about 5,000 to 10,000 transactions a day. And then June 21st, which was during the status ICO, we sent almost half a million transactions that day. So that's, that's, that's growth for you right there. That's, that's why things are stressful, right? Like, that's a big number difference. Luckily, after the status ICO, things, did cool down a little bit. People were a little bit more responsible. The ICOs weren't as, they just weren't filled with as much FOMO. And then in about November, December, when CryptoKitties hit, we were right back up to

those levels that we had seen during the status ICO, but just more sustained and no end in sight. And then that's almost more scary than an ICO, right? Because you're like, when is this going to end? Is this going to be, is this the new normal? You know, how do we, how do we learn to sustain this? You know, when are we going to scale Ethereum? Those types of questions. And so for a service like yours, is it something where if you scale that that helps alleviated or is it more limited to what's actually happening on the blockchain? And so you're just sort of dealing with, you know, whatever capacity constraints here are set by that.

blockchain so it's definitely twofold there's definitely things that there's like a limit that the aetherium blockchain can handle like then the amount of transactions held per block and the amount of blocks per second or minute or hour or whatever you know that that all are pretty hard limits where we can do things to improve is you know how our nodes receive traffic how they process that traffic, how fast they respond to requests, like, what's my balance or, you know, what's all, what, what are my token balances? And so it is twofold. Like, we were definitely going down while the Ethereum blockchain was just chugging away. You know, in December, January, we started seeing the limits being hit on the Ethereum blockchain itself, though. And so then,

you know, now we need to talk about, okay, so when is proof of stake? How is that? How is that going to be rolled out safely? What can people like us due to assist that process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, we'll see. And is there something that people like, companies like yours can do for that? So what I'm encouraging the team to do really is be just more involved and talking more to the core sort of people that are working at the Ethereum Foundation or doing research. So Ethereum, we have this EIP process, which is basically these like Ethereum proposals

of how things should work in the future. And some are really high level, some of them are low level, some of them are in between. But I'm encouraging our team to just be more involved, be, you know, things that matter to us, comment on, and stay positive and stay encouraging towards those who are working on solving these really, really hard problems.

And if there is an opportunity for us to help in any way to do so, because I think that, you know, one of the reasons I love this space so much, but especially the Ethereum space, is just how great everyone is at working together and encouraging each other and being supportive. You know, that's why we're here. Like, what? I don't know if we can do anything, but, hey, we'll do our best to try. And I want to go back to how you were talking about how things got super crazy for you in 2017. And just remind me, again, when was the status ICO? Was it June? Yeah.

So the status ICO was June 21st. And that was really that peak. Like that was the graph went all the way up hockey stick style. And that status ICO was that peak right there. And then it kind of leveled out and chilled for a little bit. Okay. And so what did a day in the life of Taylor Monaghan look like at that time? Oh, God.

It was not a good life. I would essentially wake up whenever one of like my emergency alarms would go off, meaning if someone on the team called me, if there was like something really bad happening or if the servers were offline. And usually that was like, it really just depended, but it was usually about three hours after I'd gone to sleep. So if that was at 9 a.m., I'd wake up at 9. I'd put out whatever the fire was, that was that fire. I would try to either prepare for the next ICO. I would try to answer support tickets because we were not, our support staff was like not fully up to date at that point.

I think we had two people working support during the status ICO. And we would just like try to crank through as many tickets as we could. We tried to update the site in as many ways we could in between ICOs to inform people about the important things, so they didn't have to email support. And then I would like basically repeat those sorts of tasks. So either updating the website, updating the knowledge base, answering support tickets, talking to people in the community about things that were going on. We had fishing website, so a lot of times I'd be sending takedowns for that or finding them.

And then at some point, I would take a nap, meaning I would just like fall fast to sleep, like pass out. for a couple hours and then repeat that. And so I was essentially sleeping maybe, or sleeping like on a cycle where I'd like nap just periodically whenever I could catch a couple, a couple hours worth of sleep. And it was not like, that's when I say like it wasn't healthy.

Like it was not fun. My husband would literally just like bring me food. He was helping with support tickets. It was just rough. Like it was just like we didn't have enough people to help. There were too many people to help. We were seeing people. lose heaps of money. It was, you know, whether it's the fishing sites or like not being

educated about how to invest in an ICU or whatever, it was like terrible to just be constantly inundated with emails about people who entered this base hopeful and then, you know, suddenly had their funds lost. Like that just really, really sucked and I really wanted to fix it. And it's not, it's not an easy problem to fix. And so like given this experience and all the problems that you saw people who were facing, what do you think are the main issues in the crypto community or around Ethereum, my guess, specifically, and what needs to be solved next for people, you know, for wider adoption to happen? I think education is really, really key. And I think that, you know, I used to think that just educating people more and having like a better user interface would

solve a lot of the problems that we're seeing. But, you know, more and more I'm thinking about, what are the practices that we allow? So, for example, allowing people to connect via their private key in their browser by going to a website. Like, that's something that people are kind of taught that is okay because we're like, okay, yeah, go to mycryptor.com, type in your private key, off you go. And then when they, you know, when they go and an ICO promises them free money or they, up on a fishing site accidentally, they never have that stop moment. They never have like, oh, hey, pause. Is this the correct website? Am I in the in the right place? Is this a scam? They never have those moments. So I think that, you know, educating the user is massively important.

And we need to do a better job with our user interface, with the language that we use, with even not language things, things like icons or illustrations to really get our points across and warn people about, you know, the dangers of cryptocurrencies. And I also think that instilling best practices in our own website would be immensely helpful. And that's one of the reasons that we're literally building as fast as we can on desktop and mobile apps. So we can start re-educating people and be like, okay, private keys in the browser are not necessarily a good thing. And you need a thing twice before you do it. Okay. So here's something that I don't understand because I actually have not.

actually use the service. I've generated a private key, but then obviously I didn't have like money attached to it or anything, so I never used it again. But if I go back to the site and let's say that I do have funds in that address, then how does that work? And then how does a fishing site get me to give them the money, you know, accidentally? Right. So with the private key options, and this is just like if you enter your private key or your key store file, if you're on our site, it just unlocks your wallet and it gives you access to, it'll show your address, it'll show your balance, it'll show your token balances, et cetera. And unfortunately, like, even though we don't transmit your private key at any time, because it's not necessary,

if you're on a fake website, the fake website will transmit your private key to their servers. So essentially, if you're on, you know, we're seeing very creative versions of both my crypto and my ether wallet, you know, we'll see three Ls instead of two Ls, we'll see zeros instead of O's, you know, those types of things. If you accidentally end up on one of these sites, when you go and you unlock your wallet, instead of everything remaining on your computer, it'll send that private information out. And so once they have that private key, then they have access to your account and they can do whatever they want. And that's obviously like incredibly detrimental to your average user. Yeah, and I remember that there was a fishing scam with my Ether wallet where instead of the

two L's, it was two capital I's, but in a Sansera font, which is what our browsers use. You can't tell the difference. So one other thing I was wondering about is how did my Ether wallet make money and how is my crypto going to make money? So my crypto relies exclusively at this point on just kind of these rev share models. So we have agreements with Coinbase, who else, Coinbase, ShapeShift, Ledger, Trezer, and Ether cards. And essentially, if you either purchase a hardware wallet or an Ether card through our affiliate links, or you buy Ether with USC via Coinbase, or you trade Ether and tokens via ShapeShift, we get a really small, small amount back due to that transaction.

And so that's awesome. And we do actually pretty well off of those. Like I was surprised. I think it's because, I don't know, it's because we make it easy. But I also think that it's a huge, our users are like really big fans of us. Like I'm pretty sure they're really like clicking those affiliate links with purpose. And I just like, I'm super grateful for that. Moving forward though, I'm really excited to start playing with other monetization strategies

that find the right balance between giving users really useful features and also monetizing so that we can have a sustainable business. And some of the things that we're talking about are things like delayed transactions. And that's a good example because it's something that you're, you know, you don't need it to do. You don't ever have to. Like I don't want to just put transaction fees on things. but if you find that feature useful, so if you find the feature of, hey, I want to send money in an hour or a day or a week useful, you know, paying a really, really small transaction fee for that would be awesome. And there's a lot of things that smart contracts enable us to do that hopefully will help not only our business be sustainable, but also smart contract developers and other developers in this space help them have sustainable businesses and keep building awesome things.

It's sort of like scheduling payments or something like that. Like if you have like bill pay, but you don't want to pay it until later. Right. Exactly. So delayed transactions are they can be used for things like bill pay. They can also be used. You know, let's say that you're on a plane during an ICO that you really want to get it on. You could schedule that transaction up front and be like, hey, send this transaction during this time.

There's a lot of different use cases for it. But to build it in a decentralized fashion that then kicks out a very small fee back. to the person who helps broadcast that transaction, that would be really, really awesome. It would almost be like a little secondary market. And it's not necessarily paying out to us. It could be paying out to any people who want to make money sending these delayed transactions, which is, I think, even more remarkable and cooler. Huh.

That's sort of like, for an earlier story, I wrote about these quote unquote bidding rings that enables people who were, for instance, like asleep during the NOSIS ICO to participate? Is that kind of what you're talking about there? Yeah, exactly. So the way that it works in, and this is like why I love the blockchain, right? Because everything, you take this really simple concept of like, hey, I want someone to send my transaction later. And then someone creates this like super fancy smart contract that becomes this decentralized way. So what these would do is essentially you decide you want to send a transaction at a certain time.

You would fill in the details and send all the necessary information. And then any party on the internet that was kind of watching for these types of transactions could pick that transaction up and then broadcast it at that time. And this could be done almost automatically. So just like almost like mining, right? Like this is not, they don't go and like actually manually do the math themselves. the computer just does it, it could be set up sort of like that. And our, you know, my crypto could be one of the people that send these transactions at the specified times. But there's also other parties.

And so you're incentivizing these parties to send the transactions for these people. And at the end of the day, everyone wins. And it's essentialized. I just think it's the coolest thing. Yeah, yeah. I thought that was an interesting detail when I reported that. You've also said in other interviews that you hate initial coin offerings. Why? I do. And, you know, I have to, I have to, like, remember to, like, balance it because it's not that I hate the concept of them. Like, I think that just like everything in this decentralized future land, they are, they're perfect in the sense that you allow this decentralized crowdfunding mechanism to reward people who are building things.

The reason I hate them in their current form is that most of these projects, are raising far too much money with far too little work. And really the greed is overpowering, but also just like the really just flat out scammers and fraudulent ICOs. And so while I'm a huge fan of, say, like the Nosis team, the Golem team, the status team, like, you know, these ICOs, like I think that they have good intentions and they want the best for the ecosystem. A lot of what we saw in 2017 was just flat out scams. that's where my hatred comes from. It's just people taking advantage of other people for really no reason except for money. Yeah. As a reporter, I also saw how much the space changed in that fashion and it was also really disheartening and what's the word? Disgusting, frankly.

But anyway, you've also said in other interviews that it was quote unquote, not in the game plan to run a company ever, which I thought was pretty funny. And you also said you'd never been an employee before and that you don't even know what it's like to be an employee. So how did you learn how to run a company and how like what principles are you using to guide yourself? So I'm definitely flying by the seat of my pants. I definitely look. I listen to the feedback from my team more than anything else. I talk to other people who've run companies. But at the end of the day, it's a lot easier to make decisions on what is best for my team by just asking them, hey, what do you guys think is best for you? And it's really quite interesting because I think that in a lot of traditional businesses,

like my dad, for example, was laughing at me when I told them this because he was like, he just couldn't fathom asking the people who work for him what they think is best for like, you know, for the company. But I really rely on the people around. me and especially my team to sort of guide me and tell me, tell me things like, hey, what benefits are valuable to you, for example? You know, would you rather be a contractor and an employee? You know, how do I incentivize you? How do I make you happy?

And they're really best suited to answer those questions. And then for, you know, in terms of like making hard decisions and figuring out the long term, right? How do I make this a sustainable business? How do I make this not something that is going to fail in a couple of years? How do I make this so I can rely on it for income, but also everyone that's now relying on it? You know, the team, how can they rely on it? How can we be sure that it can be relied on? Those types of questions.

I am just so fortunate to have a number of key people around me that have given me advice who've watched people do things right. They've watched people do things wrong. and they're very willing to share all of those experiences with me. And I would say that my dad is like one of my biggest fans and he has such an immense amount of experience that I draw from talking to my dad is such a great reminder that at the end of the day, we're all humans and that regardless of all the things that we're disrupting, the lessons we can learn about how to be better and how to be more responsible and how to be more efficient and how to be more effective in what we're trying to do,

those are all universal things. It doesn't matter whether you're running a traditional company, a blockchain company, a decentralized company. None of that matters. You know, we're all humans. We're all, you know, we're all kind of driven by the same sorts of things. And if you can get to the, you know, sort of the core of what people need and what people want, whether that's people on your team or just users of your product or whatever,

if you can understand that, you're going to be in a good position. And it's just finding out how to balance those different needs and desires to make it work for everyone. That's the hard part. But it's really important to keep that in mind that, you know, we are all at the end of the day the same and trying to do the same sorts of things, you know, and incentivize those, quote unquote, good behaviors, I guess. And so this sort of leads us into the little controversy that occurred when you moved over to My Crypto, which is that I guess, you change the my ether wallet Twitter handle to my crypto and then after there was an outcry over this you reversed course and gave the Twitter handle back to my ether wallet. So why did you keep the Twitter handle initially and then why did you give it back and launch a new one? Right. And this is,

I have to be careful here, so I'm going to do the best I can. But, you know, as I spoke about earlier, you know, KVHNUC during, you know, mid-2017 and ICA madness really just wasn't involved in the day-to-day anymore. And so, you know, as we were trying to get this company situated, as we were trying to figure out the best path forward, we were trying to work with him, we were trying to figure out really any solution we could, you know, I didn't, I was able to sort of let a lot of my personal and emotional attachment to the to the to the my ether wallet brand and the meu like the mew family go in order to make some really really tough decisions but i really just never felt comfortable giving the twitter to someone that wasn't going to use it

and that was really really kind of my greatest fear was like we tweet every single day about security issues, whether it's related to Ethereum or the larger blockchain space or even like the Specter attacks and what people should do to be safe about those and things like that. And it was our assumption that because he had never tweeted before, that would continue. When he did decide that, hey, I am going to tweet and I am going to be involved and I am going to try to do things, then I really had a much, I really didn't have a problem with giving it back. And it was much less about the backlash, although people were definitely very, very upset. And I definitely heard them loud and very, very loud and clear.

You know, but it was really like, you know, okay, if you can, if you can, you know, be dedicated to this and say that you're going to keep these people informed, you know, then okay, yeah, like go for it. Keep being that my ether wallet. Keep doing what I've been doing for the last three years. Go for it. And obviously, every single day of my life is a learning experience. And this has been, you know, one of the biggest learning experiences and really just filled with a lot of hard decisions. And I definitely am not, I do not delude myself into thinking I'm always right. I'm most certainly not right. And I do not handle things right a lot of the time. So I'm doing my best, though. So this is a question that has less to do with my crypto and my ether wallet. And I get out. ask this sort of question a lot. And it can be a little bit annoying, but it's also important to bring up these questions to get the perspectives of people like you and me. How do you view being

a woman in crypto? Do you think we need more women in the space? And if so, how do we get more women? Like, what's your take on being what is perceived as a minority in the space? You know, I definitely, how do I say this? I definitely, there's days that I feel very sort of alone being a woman in the space. And there's definitely days like the, you know, during the transition from my ether wallet to my crypto, some of the choices we made like the Twitter, I definitely really felt my womanness was front and center

during a lot of the comments on Reddit and Twitter. And it's like really just that blatant sort of misogyny that otherwise is pretty rare or much more subtle at least. So I don't want to. like bring up something unpleasant, but just for people to understand what that's like to be on the receiving end of that? Like, can you give us an example of some comments? Oh yeah. I mean, it's not necessarily like any one comment, but it's just like a flood. I have like over 500 Reddit messages. I have like over 200 Twitter DMs and they're just all, you know, you're a woman. You'll never make

the right decisions ever. Give back the flipping Twitter. You know, they'll use words like horror. and cunt and bitch they'll say that um i'm not as uh like just inherently because i am a woman not equipped to run a company or do anything really um a lot of name calling and a lot of really just like putting putting me on blast not for my choices which i actually don't have as big of a problem with if you want to say that you think that i did something wrong or i made the wrong choice but because i'm a woman that's what caused me to make that choice and that's what wrong with me. That's when I get really, it hits me the hardest, I think. I'm like, okay, if I was a man and I made this choice, like, that would be the, you know, what you

perceived to be the wrong choice. That's fine. Tell me that. Like, okay. But don't tell me that I made that choice because I'm an emotional woman that's on my period. Like, that's just, you know, it's absurd. It's hateful. It's, it's disgusting. Yeah. Okay. So to get back to the original question of how do we get more women in this space and, you know, don't call them names. So I think that, you know, I will say that for the most part in this space, I have experienced very little just like the outward hatred comments that I was just talking about, right? Like that's a pretty rare occurrence and really limited to when you're making hard, controversial decisions.

And that's fine. to get more women in the space though i think that we just need to encourage more women and i think that everyone sort of needs to get on board with with acknowledging that more diversity and you know i like i like the word diversity more than just like women because it really is it's not just women it's it's everyone that's a minority in the space everyone just needs to acknowledge that there are minorities uh there are people whose views are not being you know heard or seen or you know being used to build products. And I think one of the most important things about having diversity when building products is the, you know, with more diversity comes more experiences. It becomes more perspectives. It's more

it's different solutions to problems. It's all of these different things that, you know, if you only have one type of person or one person's background, you're limited by the potential solutions that you can come up with. And, you know, earlier I was talking about how I, you know, it was really easy for me to make decisions early on because I was essentially the user of my ether wallet. When I was building or making a choice, as long as I understood it, it was probably okay because the user would understand it. Today, that's not the case.

And so having more women, but also having people from different, like different cultures, different societies, different upbringings. different age demographics, those are all going to make every product stronger and everyone's experience better. And I think that in order to get that, we have to all acknowledge that first. And that's one of the biggest problems I see right now is that people are saying, oh, it's not a problem that there's such a lack of diversity here. You know, that's the biggest problem. It's not, you know, it's that people think that it's not an issue and it is an issue. You know, having only one perspective is going to limit the potential of any one product or any one solution or anyone anything to, you know, replace the financial system that we all, you know, are fighting against right now.

Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you're saying here. So I have a lot more to add on this, but we're running out of time. And I want to ask you another super, super important and more practical or not more practical, but just, I guess, more nuts and bolts question. What is your advice for what people should do to not lose their crypto? That's an excellent question. I think that my best advice is to take it slow. And that means when you make the choice to invest or dive in or fall down the rabbit hole or however you want to describe it, go as slow as you can and maybe start with $10, maybe start with $50, you know, and kind of go through the steps. And so whether that's making the purchase on Coinbase,

and then moving to My Crypto, whether that's making a token transaction with ShapeShift, regardless of what you're trying to accomplish, if you start with a little amount, you can kind of go through and experience the whole thing. And if something goes wrong, it's not the end of the world. And that's a good thing. So, you know, I think that for me personally, I wasn't really comfortable with a lot of the things on the blockchain until I had done it over and over and over again. but what sucks is that we're seeing people that are diving in so deeply with so much money

that when they do make a mistake, which is a pretty common thing. I think we've all made mistakes. They're doing so with a lot of money and a lot more money than they can afford to lose. And I think that's the key here is start small and don't lose more than you can afford to lose. I agree with all of that advice. That's great advice. Although nothing we say on the podcast is financial advice. Okay, so it's been great having you as a guest, Taylor.

Where can people get in touch with you or see more of your work? Yeah, I mean, if you go to mycrypto.com at the very bottom in the footer, there's a whole bunch of like our social links. You can email me personally at Tay at mycrypto.com. That's like my personal email and I'm always just like having conversations in that inbox these days. And yeah, I really love Twitter. So at My Crypto.

and then I'm just at at Tavano, T-A-Y-V-A-N-O-O- underscore on Twitter. So it's pretty easy to find all my links. You can do it. Okay. All right, great. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Laura. This is really an excellent, excellent experience.

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Taylor and MyCrypto.com, check out the notes inside your podcast. Also, be sure to follow me on Twitter at Laura Schen. New episodes of Unchained come out every single Tuesday. If you haven't already, rate review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you like this episode, share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Elaine Zelby and Fractal Recording. Thanks for listening.