AMA w/ Monolith Co-Founder Mel Gelderman

BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: GET LEDGERS for 40% OFF! 🔥🔥🔥 https://bankless.cc/ledger 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: http://bankless.substack.com/ ✊ STARTING GUIDE BANKLESS: https://bit.ly/37Q17uI ❤️ JOIN PRIVATE DISCORD: https://bit.ly/2UVI10O 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ 👕 BUY BANKLESS TEE: https://merch.banklesshq.com/ ----- GO BANKLESS WITH THESE SPONSOR TOOLS: ⭐️LEDGER - 40% OFF LEDGERS THIS WK ONLY! 🔥🔥🔥 https://bankless.cc/ledger 🚀 ZERION - INVEST IN DEFI FROM ONE PLACE (download it now!) https://bankless.cc/zerion 💳 MONOLITH - GET THE HOLY GRAIL OF BANKLESS VISA CARDS https://bankless.cc/monolith 🤖YEARN - YIELD-SEEKING MONEY ROBOT THAT FARMS DEFI FOR YOU http://bankless.cc/yearn ------ AMA w/ Monolith Co-Founder Mel Gelderman Mel Gelderman comes to the Bankless community AMAs to answer questions about Monolith! ------ Don't stop at the video! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit the official Bankless website for resources http://banklesshq.com/ http://banklesshq.com/%7C Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time we may add links in this channel to products we use. We may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. We'll always disclose when this is the case.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  The.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

  The.

• 4:29David Hoffman?

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

• 5:11David Hoffman?

  Zerion also makes it super easy to access interest in DeFi using applications like Compound and Aave in the background. And you can also exchange your assets using the Zerion app, using an exchange aggregator in the background to make sure that you always get the best rates. You can even use the Zerion mobile wallet to add your MetaMask or Argent or another Ethereum address right into your mobile wallet so you can see your portfolio and engage in DeFi on the go. Here I just loaded up my Argent wallet and now I'm going to load up my MetaMask as well. And Zerion will do the same thing. It will add all of my assets and wallets together, all in one space and give me a portfolio summary of what's going on. Adding wallets is trivially easy. If you already have a MetaMask, you can get it right into the Zerion app

• 5:55David Hoffman?

  and it can sync with your desktop app as well. And the best part is you can also buy Ether right into the app itself. Use the Invest tab to look at all the things that you have invested in, as well as other opportunities. And coming soon to the Zerion app is the ability to buy and sell your assets straight from your mobile device as well. So download the app. It works on iOS and Android. Go to zerion.io, plug in your wallets and get a historical report of your portfolio over time, as well as a comprehensive breakdown of all the assets that you own and how much yield they're generating for you. We're also brought to you by Monolith. Monolith is your cool new DeFi account, your DeFi savings account, your DeFi checking account.

• 6:37David Hoffman?

  Except the cool thing about the Monolith DeFi account is that it gets software updates, right? You actually get to increase the usefulness of this over time. So here are some of the features. Monolith is a smart contract wallet with a lot of the features that you would expect if you've come to know DeFi and what it is. You can, you can add money to it. You can put that money to work in Compound and accessing yield. But you can, and you can also swap through Uniswap. What was cool with Monolith is that they will send you a very sexy Monolith Visa card that connects to your smart Monolith smart contract wallet on Ethereum. So it's a really awesome tool to live a bankless life with a savings account that gets software updates. So this is something that you're never going to find out in the real world,

• 7:21David Hoffman?

  but you can still do real world things with, you know, real money and like buy your groceries. So that's just fantastic. Coming soon to Monolith, actually already here to Monolith is now you can buy, die and get it sent to your wallet directly, right? So it's also being an on-ramp. So you don't have to go through your centralized exchange like Coinbase or Gemini or wherever. You can just go straight from your bank account, right into your Monolith checking account, smart contract wallet. So check them out at monolith.xyz.

• 7:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey, Bankless Nation, welcome to another Bankless Community AMA. Super excited to bring this to you on a Thursday. As usual, these AMAs get released on our YouTube live. And then you can also hear them on the podcast. There are two ways of tapping into this. And if you want to ask a question, you could go to YouTube right now, get your question in the chat box. Either myself or David will field that question as it comes up in our conversation with Mel Gelderman. Mel is the CEO of what we call a Bankless Visa Card, the CEO of Monolith. We've been wanting to do this conversation for a really long time. Mel, how are you doing today?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Good Ryan, thank you. Thank you both David and Ryan for having me on.

• 8:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Cheers.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I've always been very... Sorry?

• 8:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thanks for being here.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've always been delighted to be able to like sponsor your whole operation, so, or at least the podcast.

• 8:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 8:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it's fantastic. You know, David and I are very like selective in terms of the products and like the sorts of tools that we put on the podcast in front of our listeners. It's got to fit the thesis. It's got to fit the thesis. It's got to be products that we love, use ourselves. We can't quite use Monolith yet because unfortunately for us, we are US-based, but hopefully we could talk about that. But Mel, I think some folks might not know what Monolith is. I was wondering if you could give us an overview of what the Monolith Visa Card is?

• 9:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  And some of the other stuff that you guys have put together for the DeFi, Bankless crypto community who want to live a bit more self-sovereign? Want to live on that frontier that we're always talking about without having all of their funds and assets controlled by the bank? So what are you guys bringing to the table here at Monolith?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, I think fundamentally the premise that Monolith is building on is the idea that there was going to be one day this Ethereum economy, right? This, you know, parallel financial system that would emerge on top of Ethereum. And, um, and we're actually seeing that, right? The last two years that has actually started to come to fruition, right? More and more quickly by the day. And what we wanted to do for that, what we decided to do a few years ago was to try and build a functional equivalent product

• 10:38Speaker 02

  to what everyone in the world currently uses today, which is a bank account, say. And but instead, the financial services that we're that we're providing are powered by the therm economy, what we today call DeFi, which is a much more catchy term. Um, I always regret not coming up with the term bankless ourselves, but what we are trying to do is, um, we are allowing, trying to allow people to live essentially a bankless life that doesn't, um, have to change the the users habits, right? Like that they can't pay in the shop anymore, say, uh, and do and receive, receive their salary anymore,

• 11:19Speaker 02

  right? Because the reality is, although there's probably, you know, optimistically, like a hundred thousand or so people who actually use DeFi to some degree or other in the world today, maybe that's too much. Um, the reality is the rest of the world for years to come will still be entrenched in this massive old financial system that exists today. And therefore, um, we have to build a product that tries to incorporate that all world

• 11:51Speaker 02

  into this new thriving but fledgling DeFi economy and and and allow that to just, yeah, like harmoniously work together, right? And that is what Monet is. So so very practically, that means that we have an Okstoria wallets, um, a DeFi wallets, and, um, we are attaching to that more conventional financial services, right? So most notably, obviously, we have a Visa debit card, right? And, um, we're indeed live in the European Union and the UK, which about to leave the EU, blah, blah. Um, that's how we're live today. But, um, yeah, we, we, um, this is just the, the, um, birth ground of our products.

• 12:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is this like, this is just like the age old crypto dream of being able to go to Starbucks and buy your coffee essentially without fiat, without a bank, if you so choose, in a self-sovereign way, right? Like, I feel like crypto has talked about this dream since 2012 and 2013.

• 12:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  And you guys are actually pulling it off because you know, it's one thing to have a a Visa card in crypto, right? Like a Coinbase can do this. There are other crypto banks that that do this. But to do it all non-custodially from a smart contract wallet, that sir is truly bankless. Uh, and well done for bringing the the crypto dream to fruition. I I feel like that's like, did that motivate you guys? Is it, do you always want to ba- basically be able to use crypto in a practical way? And is that the reason?

• 13:27Speaker 02

  It is so funny. It's so funny that you mentioned that. Because that's completely right. This is how it started. So back in, as you states, the, you know, the like, the early days of crypto, when Bitcoin first emerged, 2013. Um, I was so in love with Bitcoin. It was the best thing I'd ever seen, right? It was so anti-establishment. It was, it was, it was the most outrageous technology that I I knew of at the time. And um, I was so obsessed with it, I basically ditched all my bank accounts, canceled all my bank accounts and decided to only live with Bitcoin.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And um, I started to travel around, I quit university and started to travel around and that was a really hard life, living with just Bitcoin back then, right? So I would literally, there was this map back then. Now I'd have to use like mycelium, right? Like peer-to-peer, I'd have to physically meet people in pe- in person who would give me Taiwan dollars and I would give them some Bitcoin, right? And it felt like this really dodgy deal. But that's what it was like back then. And um, and and why I believed that was so important to me is because I wanted to just put my money where my mouth was, right? Like, I believed that with Bitcoin originally, we were starting to see

• 14:50Speaker 02

  this new zeitgeist emerged, this new phase of society, right? The start of that. And um, I wanted to live that, right? Like, there were so many people in our industry back then who were just talking about it when I was actually doing it, right? No one was using Bitcoin day to day. And and I wanted to do that, but the reality was it's next to impossible, right? Like, you're only gonna do that if you're absolutely obsessed with this stuff. For any normal person. That's just not a way to live. And the reality is that adoption of crypto directly has not really taken off yet, even since then, right? And it's not something that is going to happen anytime soon either.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  And therefore, it just makes most sense to incorporate the very best of the old world, which basically is, you know, the payment networks among other things, and just incorporate that into, you know, our crypto experience, right? And that is indeed how origin it started. Yeah.

• 15:56David Hoffman?

  Well, that's a fantastic story, Mel. And you clearly have a ton of energy and excitement and passion, which is exactly what you need to really build out something fantastic in the crypto space. So tip of the hat for all of that. You definitely have the right vision. I want to get to the topic of like, you talked about moving into this new world, this new phase of humanity, which is something that we see in the, in something we talk about on the Bankless Podcast all the time. We also talk about the friction between a new world and an old world. And this seems to be the, what Monolith as a company is really targeting as a problem, right? Like, we have this old world, and we have this new world, and there's a disconnect between those. And Monolith tries to bridge that disconnect by offering a smart contract wallet,

• 16:41David Hoffman?

  where you can hold your assets, and then a Visa card, where you can use it in the old world. But that, I would imagine, building that bridge is pretty difficult. Can you kind of describe how that bridge is constructed? And how a Visa card comes to be connected to a smart contract wallet on Ethereum?

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Indeed, it's not easy.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  We have to, you know.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Like if you compare us to the a lot of crypto wallets that exist today or DeFi wallets that exist in our space today. A lot of them don't really have to deal with the real world. Basically, they can operate entirely within the, you know, within the DeFi space and the, you know, the cloud realm. We can't do that. We have to operate within the, you know, the established financial world, simply because we want to offer those services, right? And so that means that we have to offer, we have to do AML, we have to follow all the AML anti-money laundry rules and regulations in the EU.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  And we have to do KWC on users. And this is, you know, to appease the regulator, but also to make sure that Visa is confident that we are not, you know, laundering money for, right, or like for users, right? Um, I think, um, yeah, those are, those are pretty significant challenges. Um, because in effect, what we have built, we haven't just built Ethereum wallets, right? Uh, contract wallets. We've also built a complete, um, like challenger bank, right? Um, to get the bank part specifically, we're not a bank, but like legally, we're not a bank. We don't hold used deposits, but

• 18:37Speaker 02

  um, we have had to build the same as, you know, in Europe, we have Revolut and we have Monzo and we have N26.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  We've had to build all of that stuff as well. And that's something that, um, you know, other Ethereum wallets haven't necessarily had to do. So, yeah, it's an incredible amount of work and, um, it's pretty amazing that we've actually pulled it off, to be honest. So, yeah.

• 19:00David Hoffman?

  When you swipe your Visa card, how, how does DAI or any other asset, if there are other assets, uh, how does that come to be a transaction on Ethereum?

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have, um, we have, um,

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Currently, the way our system works is that it uses as a top up. So in our experience, a user goes to their card screen. And they can press the top up button and then they can choose from a list of ERC 20 tokens that are supported for top up. And which one they want to basically convert into fiat to put on the card itself, right? This is how a user transitions from funds in their contract wallets in their own control to having funds on their Visa debit card. There's a very direct action that the user has to take. They physically are sending a transaction from their own control into effectively,

• 20:00Speaker 02

  you know, like a backend service that we run, which will top up their card with the, with that amount in pounds or euro equivalents. And that they can then, you know, assuming the, it takes 15 seconds to confirm that transaction within 15 seconds. These will have, you know, money on their card.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  We are able to transition to a more direct model. Where the user doesn't have to do the top up.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  But that is, until quite recently, that hasn't really been allowed by the powers that be. Because Visa, for example, wants to keep quite a strong distinction between, you know, the crypto network and their network. They don't like when, when people get the impression that, oh, Visa supports Ethereum directly, right? So, but this is starting to change. And we have that option now, so. And we do want to reduce friction. So we probably will end up doing that.

• 21:05David Hoffman?

  Is there, is there an oracle that's involved with that transaction? Or if, say, you have some like, perhaps some niche ERC 20 token that has a relatively low market cap, low liquidity, but it's supported on Monolith because you guys are awesome. You guys, you guys support a bunch of stuff. How do you guys actually come to know how much fiat to deposit into the Monolith fiat into the card? As a result of that transaction, where does that information come from?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we are um hooked up to most large um well, in some cases on-chain oracles. Like honestly, like we're we have data feeds from price feeds from most large sources. So CoinGecko and Chainlink um and CoinMarketCap, but CoinMarketCap sometimes doesn't support all of them. Um yeah, we have like lots of price sources. Um yeah, and

• 22:03David Hoffman?

  Perfect.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Um for the most part, um especially for stablecoins, we are adamant on making sure that the price the user is getting is actually the price of the token itself. Um because yeah, if we want this ultimately to be this platform that can replace um users' bank accounts today, then there can't can't be these additional fees that don't exist today, right? We can't have a service that kind of like takes a step back. So um we we we pretty much, we are genuinely the cheapest place to use and use your crypto, honestly.

• 22:43David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I I wanted to, we can tie a bow off of like the mechanisms of how money gets into the Visa card. And I want to tie that off by like defining what parts are trustless and non-custodial and what parts are custodial. So it sounds like the the product that Monolith offers is that it allows a user a pretty strong amount of flexibility with how much trust they want to have in a third-party in- institution, right? And so the Monolith smart contract, while it seems to be the non-custodial, trustless part of the equation. And then the flexibility of being able to top up your Monolith Visa cards, like when you put $500 into your Monolith Visa card, that becomes the trusted part of the equation.

• 23:23David Hoffman?

  And the what's really compelling to me is that a a user gets to measure how much they put in their Visa cards. Like, well, I only want to put in $50 today, or I want to I want to load it up with, you know, $500, $1,000. And that having that flexibility is really valuable. And there's no other way to do this. Like, how else do you get integrated with the Visa network without having a um a a trusted uh third party to get in to connect you to the network? What is the network except a trusted third party? Is that is that like the right way to view these things?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  That's completely correct. The additional benefit that doing it this way has is that the user can choose when they are effectively topping up their card. So for what price, right? So let's say the price of ETH is really high tonight. They can choose it. They could choose up. They can choose to top up like a thousand pounds worth of ETH now rather than at the point of sale, which may not be the right price for them, right?

• 24:16David Hoffman?

  Right. So you, you could, you as an ether owning individual, maybe I'm walking to my local coffee shop and then I realize like, oh snap, I actually don't have any money in my Visa card, my Monolith Visa card. I can just throw it right in there. And by the time I get to the coffee shop, that Visa card is ready to go. So that, that feels pretty damn like self-sovereign and empowering to me.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's still, you know, like, this is currently the most trustless attempt in the world of creating, you know, this, this type of system, right? And I think people can get really caught up in the, the theoretical black and whiteness of, of, of a discussion like this, but you know, obviously we want to get to this most trustless destination, but this is just where we are now and we're, we're always moving further towards that.

• 25:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you guys seem to really emphasize the, the user always has the choice. And if that is true, then that is, that is what we want. Yeah.

• 25:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  You know, it's really interesting about this, Mel, is you, you're talking earlier about how like getting this all up has been difficult. Like it's, you didn't take shortcuts in terms of setting up this infrastructure, right? But I, I'm also struck by how that approach is kind of like a long-term approach here because like you talked about Monolith being almost like a DeFi bank, right? So now that you have the Visa bridge, you have it one location right now. You can of course expand that to other locations, fingers crossed, US, we'll get to it. But also the smart contract piece, right? It, the, the wallet piece where, where User might keep most of their funds.

• 26:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That is essentially the most valuable bank account. Any sovereign individual has ever had. I tweeted this out recently, like. My Ether account is 100x better than my Wells Fargo account. In terms of raw power, like superpowers it gives me. And every single day. My Ether account, my Ether wallet, that address becomes more and more valuable. Why? Because there are thousands, soon to be hundreds of thousands. Of people developing Money Legos, DeFi protocols. To make my Ethereum bank account even better, right? So like.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Software.

• 26:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now the, it's software updates. Now that you have this smart contract infrastructure. Right? Where that that's keeping a user funds, you have access to suddenly every single ERC20 asset. That gets put on the Ethereum blockchain. Not only that. But you have all of the other protocols, the ability to do trades, maybe in the future, right from that account. The the ability to deposit. Uh, some of those funds into a compound or an AVE. Like get a loan, lend them out. Whatever is built on DeFi becomes part of the monolith wallet. That seems to me is like. That's the best way to do this whole thing, right? Because you're tapping into DeFi. Can you tell us a little bit about?

• 27:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Maybe that side of things on the smart contract wallet side, while your money is sitting idle. Uh, what sorts of things can a a user deposit them in today? And then what what do you have in store for the future here?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Um, I look, I think you're completely correct. So. The fundamental premise here is that unlike, say, a challenger bank. Um, like a Revolut's. Um, we don't have to build all of the financial services ourselves. Instead, we benefit from probably some of the most bright people in the world. Who are currently, you know, engaged in building this totally new financial system.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  And our users, as long as our platform is set up for this, our users stand to benefit incredibly from this. So, and it's a lot bigger than crypto, right? So, um, you know, if during the last big bubble in 2017, 2017, 18, crypto was interesting to, crypto, crypto as in like old school crypto was interesting to say 100 million people at most in the world.

• 28:45Speaker 02

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

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Um, and I think that ultimately that is, is where Moneth is trying to go, right? So the question that has really started to emerge in the last,

• 29:42Speaker 02

  probably a year or so, uh, has become more apparent is that as DeFi is accelerating, um, how, what will be the way that regular people will really interact with DeFi? That's still a huge question. And, um, you know, originally the thesis was that

• 30:05Speaker 02

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

• 30:48Speaker 02

  And, and therefore, chances are, the way, you know, a normal person will interact with DeFi in the future, will actually be through several layers of abstraction. Right? So, and, and what I'm trying to say is, what Monolith, the, the path that Monolith has gone down today, is that we have built this, you know, without my compliance officer losing his mind, we've built this, you know, functional equivalent to a bank account for the DeFi crowd, for people like yourselves and the listeners.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  But we will have to evolve our products further.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  There is a second chapter here that we will be, that we're embarking on, and to make that work for everyone else. Because the reality of DeFi today, as much as we love it and it's fledgling, is that it is only serving the DeFi elites. There is not a single person outside of the DeFi elites, or just DeFi in general, the community, that is actually benefiting from DeFi today.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And that's because we, you know, and therefore, this is the, the piece of work that we want to try and go down. You know, just to give a practical example of that, if I go to my mother, um, and, you know, like to her, choosing between 20 different dollar tokens doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. And 20 different dollar tokens is today, tomorrow it'll be 10, you know, like a thousand, right? Um, and therefore, what we think, um, at least where we're going is we want to build this tailored, curated and safe experience, um, that still maintains all of the properties that we love about DeFi.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Um, but that does allow a normal person who doesn't want to stick all of their time into understanding all of this, because most people don't want to, right? Um, they just want to get on with their life, um, we, but we do want them to be able to access the benefits of DeFi. Um, and that's what like ultimately, um, we're focused on right now. Um, because we think that within five years, there won't be, you know, like, like chances are, there will be an experience of money that is so much better than what you can get in the conventional financial world today. That hordes of people are migrating to it, right?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  That there will literally be, you know, probably by the end of the decade, for sure, there'll be a billion people using DeFi. Chances are that's going to happen in the next five years as well. And we want to make sure that we're the company doing the homework to try and figure out, um, what that's going to look like.

• 33:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  I always, I always think it's funny, the, the people going bankless right now in DeFi, right? They're looking at things on EtherScan. That's almost like looking at the, the firmware level of your computer. It's almost like, uh, you know, how often do you open up command line on your Mac OS? And like type in some commands? I mean, I'm using the user interface 99% of the time. And so are 99% of people who have Macs. So we are just operating at this very firmwareware command line level right now. When we see things in EtherScan or Using an AVE interface, but to see what's going to be built on top of this, like at the user interface level, the operating system level, that's where a mainstream starts coming around.

• 34:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, we should probably, uh, yeah, jump on a couple of questions that are coming in because they're coming in hot.

• 34:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we got a question from, from James from the YouTube, which actually fits right into this conversation. And so I'll give it a little bit of a preface. Mel, you talked about like building out a product for the legacy world, right? And I think if they come on to this monolith smart contract wallet Visa card, or any other company that is tackling problems like you guys are going to expect some certain features, right? And, and one of them might be like, uh, spending limits, right? Like spending limits on your card, or like, what happens if somebody loses their Visa card? Can you, can they just go and start swiping until it just gets drained? Like, what are some of the, the legacy features that you, one would expect to find in a bank account that they also find on their monolith smart contract wallet?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, we have today implemented, um, the, the features that you would kind of expect from a very modern card experience, right? So if you indeed lose your card within the app, um, you can immediately freeze your card or block your card even. You can also unfreeze it in case you find it again. Um, and yeah, you can replace it. So, um, and if you hit the replace button within, you know, well, on average, three to five days, you'll get anyone in the mail. Um, yeah.

• 35:44David Hoffman?

  And then also what about the ability to auto pull from your wallet into your card? So maybe you have $0 on your card, but you swipe it anyways, and it defaults to a specific token, or maybe Ether itself, and it swaps it right then and there. Is that a feature that's coming?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Um, I, that is a great feature suggestion. Um, it's, so the, the thing is, that would require the phone to create a transaction on behalf of the user, sending funds from the contract wallets from their own control into the top up service for the card. Currently, we're not doing that and because we want the user to basically feel like they have control and authority over that. What instead we can do is that we will send you a notification that the moment, you know, your balance on your card goes below, let's say 200 euros or something, it's telling you, hey, you may want to top up soon, right?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Um, yeah.

• 36:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Now, this is a question coming in on Discord from a bankless member, Gabor. He is, or gee, I'm not sure, is asking the question, if you've had discussions with banks on your technology, and I think the more specific question is this, he makes the comment, it should be appealing to them in particular jurisdictions where they're not permitted by regulators to offer custodial services. So could there be some idea of Monolith offering banks like these some kind of a white label type of solution where they get access to the smart contract wallet and the Monolith card and it's like, you know, Monolith by Citibank and onboarding

• 37:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  onboarding customers from banks into this bankless world? Any thoughts on that?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Um, I'm afraid I only half understand the question. What he's, he or she is saying

• 37:48Speaker 02

  that some banks can't hold custody?

• 37:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  If there's a way for you to partner with banks in any way who are sort of afraid to enter this whole DeFi space and you kind of solve that problem, basically?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I guess, I think, look, the, the problem with running a company like ours is, or the curse of running a company like Monolith is there are so many possibilities. There are so many avenues that we can go down and our space is so exciting that, you know, we could change direction almost every month.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  The thing I think I want to do most with our company is I just want to nail one thing. And that one thing that I really want to nail is I want to make money fun for normal people. Right? And I think we can do that with DeFi. And we can make, we can make this experience of money which people have never seen before, that they haven't seen with, you know, all these challenger banks from the fintech world or anywhere else. And yeah, and I think that's what we're focused on.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  We absolutely could go down an avenue of white labeling our products. Right? Like that definitely gets asks.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  And yeah, I think, you know, I, I think the other side of this is we also are quite conservative in how we run our company. So we haven't hired a massive team, right? And part of the reason for that is that we know that DeFi is quite a long game. Right? We are here and we want to see the day that DeFi reaches a billion users, but that isn't next year, right?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  The reality is we are probably still 0.0001% of the way towards that. That's the percentage of the world that currently maybe even knows what DeFi is.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  And so we are, you know,

• 40:10Speaker 02

  we just want to plan for what is realistically going to happen in the, in the near term. I guess I don't know if that half answers your question, but that's a great question. Yeah.

• 40:25David Hoffman?

  No, that, that was fantastic. Mel, we have a bunch of more questions that we want to get to, including questions about the TKN token, which I think made treasuries cool before they really rose into popularity in DeFi summer 2020. So, and we also have a bunch more user questions which we're going to get to. But we got to take a break and talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible.

• 40:47David Hoffman?

  If you want to live a bankless life, you need to get a hardware wallet. There is no alternative for storing your crypto in a self-sovereign fashion. That's why I have four ledgers that I use to manage my different crypto assets using the Ledger Live account as well. Ledger Live is like your home base for managing your Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto accounts. It does a really good job of aggregating all of your different Ethereum wallets if you are the type of person that uses more than one. But you can also add other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Cosmos or whatever your preferred blockchain is. And then it will display an aggregate portfolio of all your accounts at the main page. One thing that Ledger is doing a really good job of is enabling all the money verbs that me and Ryan talked about

• 41:32David Hoffman?

  with the Bankless Skill Cube enabled in the Ledger Live app. So right now in the Ledger Live app, you can buy, sell, lend, swap, and stake your crypto assets, which is doing a really good job of fulfilling all of the money verbs in the Bankless Skill Cube. Something that's new to Ledger Live is Ledger Swap, where you can swap assets, one for another, directly inside the Ledger Live application, ensuring trustlessness in your financial activity on Ethereum and on Bitcoin. If you want to learn more about what you can do with a ledger, go to the blog post, "The Power of Ledger Live", on the Ledger website, where they share some of the more advanced things that you can do with your ledger that you might not have known about. There's a link in the show notes that will take you to the Ledger shop, where you can get your preferred Ledger hardware wallet.

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  I personally like the Ledger Nano X, but I also have both. They're both great options. When you own a ledger, you own your own assets in the way that they have been designed to be held by the user and the user alone. So go get your ledger today to make sure that you are as self-sovereign as possible. The Bankless State of the Nations are brought to you by Wyarn. Wyarn is DeFi's first self-building, community-run project, which I just get really, really excited about. Y earn is a system that seeks out yield in DeFi and it does that in a number of different ways. A very aggressive way is with the vaults where you can deposit your preferred asset of choice and different DeFi experts will come in and generate a strategy for what to do with

• 43:00David Hoffman?

  your deposited token, right? And so it'll go find ways to get yield in that deposited token in DeFi. For those who want to just earn yield on their stable coins, the earn system is for you where you can deposit your preferred stable coin and Y earn will go and figure out which money market on DeFi and DeFi is producing the best interest rate, whether it's DY, DX, it's Compound or Ave. It looks around DeFi to see where the yield is coming from and it directs stable coins automatically. So you don't have to. Check them out at y earn dot finance to get started and also check out the stats page to see what other people are doing as well.

• 43:39David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, we are back with Mel from Monolith and Monolith has this token, this TKN token, which the token model I've always thought was pretty fascinating. And I think we've seen a lot of derivatives of that token model come out in DeFi summer 2020. But TKN was kind of the OG with this treasury model. Mel, can you kind of explain to us the TKN token and its role in the Monolith ecosystem?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I you're you're right. When Dave and I originally designed TKN, it was pretty novel.

• 44:13David Hoffman?

  Not me, by the way, different David.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Different David, yeah, my co-founder. I think what TKN currently does is upon a user topping up their card, that transaction, the function that they call to top up on our, basically our side of the contract system, actually tells the tells the user to send a small fee to this this different place, which is the treasury, basically, right? The TKN treasury. And token holders basically own what's in that, right? So we originally pioneered this burn function.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Where you would have to burn your TCAN to receive your pro-routa part of all the funds inside this treasury contracts. That where that is, that was the current thinking at the time, that will definitely change and go away. In favor of a lot more of the, you know, more attractive models that have kind of been pioneered in the last year.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  I think overall, though,

• 45:31Speaker 02

  where we really want to get to is if we are planning to have a system where we will have essentially hundreds of millions of users that are all using, that are using Monolith because it is a very convenient way to get much better money than they're used to, access to much better money than they're used to through DeFi. We can probably charge for that, right?

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Because we are providing a convenience to someone who has absolutely no idea what the hell, you know, like a a compound is, right? Or an RV is. And if we can work that into our token, where there's effectively, you know, a very large user base that is getting benefits from DeFi about that. But a percentage of that is, is going to the token. I think that's when we, that's the place we want to be ideally.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  And if we can feed that back into the product itself, where users, as they are using Monolith, the products,

• 46:44Speaker 02

  they also become co-owners of this project in a certain sense, right? Where they're receiving TCAN,

• 46:52Speaker 02

  that they become more invested in using this product, right? It's not just that, oh, money is better, but I actually start to own this platform, right? You can't say that with Bank of America or, you know, HSBC or whatever. Um, yeah, that that's pretty crazy. Um, I mean, we can do much more outrageous stuff, but but this is, I think that's the like the ultimate goal. Yeah.

• 47:18David Hoffman?

  Right. Okay. So every time somebody swipes their Visa card at the grocery store, they use up some of their money. And so then they need to add more money. And that that when they add more money, when they top up, that's when a small percentage of those money gets added to a treasury, which you can burn a TKN token to get your fair claim on the treasury, your pro-rata share. Is there anything, does the token, is it mapped out to be a governance token where the community can actually direct the the future of Monolith? Or right now, is it mostly just a value capture token?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Um, it is mostly, today, it's a value capture token. Um, we have been incredibly impressed, honestly, by like the projects we've seen emerge, right? In the last year, um, you know, RV and like yearn with, you know, like all this on-chain governance, right? And the level of feedback that like feedback loops that that can create. Um, we absolutely think that if we want to succeed in building a DeFi for the masses, um, you know, like financial interface, um, that we need to employ the community

• 48:36Speaker 02

  on the DeFi side of the equation, right? So, um, if we can ultimately turn TKN into a governance token, where we are not necessarily the ones figuring out how you like regular persons' funds should be allocated within this DeFi space, which is always growing in complexity. Instead, we can outsource that to the community and create a system that rewards the, you know, pays the community for that. Um, that's ideal.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  So yeah, I have that answer to your question.

• 49:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that makes sense. And it very feels much feels like the REI Cooperative, where if I have an REI membership, I go to REI, I buy something there. And then at the end of the year, they send me back a little cash back and dividend. And so I would imagine that if you are a Monolith user, there's a there's an elegance into the alignment between having the token, because then you're just getting cash. It's like a cash back Visa card. You swipe your Monolith Visa card, you get a little cash back. I think that's pretty cool. Is that is the TKN token the Monolith business model? Or is the actual specific Monolith team funded in additional ways or alternative ways? Or is it all based on the token?

• 49:56Speaker 02

  I think the ideal outcome is for all stakeholders to be completely aligned. And so ideally, indeed, we charge exclusively through the token. Because Monolith is a very large stakeholder in the token. And yeah, it kind of creates, you know, a really sexy streamlined system.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  It sounds like there is probably more to come on that, on the economics of that. I want to get to a question we've sort of teased from from the start of this mail. And it's a question we've probably had like from at least a half a dozen or so Bankless members, which is when North America, when the United States, is that on your roadmap? And if so, do you have any estimate on when that might be coming? Because we'd love to have our own Bankless Visa cards.

• 50:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah, when can we add to the treasury?

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I want to like, first of all, the users that we already get from Bankless are the best users, right? Like they they they use our product the most, they spend the most. So and I super appreciate indeed all of the requests from users in the US. And so the US absolutely is a large priority on our roadmap.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  As for when, the, uh, that's a little bit harder to specifically say. Um, I think the, the biggest thing that we're trying to understand and overcome right now is the, basically the regulatory um environment, because it is very different than Europe. And we're already having, like, Europe isn't easy. Um, like, they just rolled out AMLD five, right, Anti-Money Nondri Directive five. And um, basically, every country is implementing it differently. And um, as it stands, our compliance team is

• 52:04Speaker 02

  largely preoccupied with making sure that, like, we are completely happy within Europe even. Um, but, um, yeah, as soon as they can kind of figure out the, the, uh, how we would do this, handle this in, in America. We are commercially, we are, we know exactly what we want to do, and we're basically ready. Um, we just have to kind of finalize our position on that. Um, yeah.

• 52:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  You guys are kind of waiting on the regulators, basically, that's the hardest part of this whole thing, right? It's not like a technology limitation, it's not, you know, distribution limitation, it's just regulators.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it is, um, it's a big project, right? Like, um, we would, we probably will have to end up hiring, um, a team in the US um, just for compliance reasons alone. Um, and, yeah, like, we're, we're, we're approaching that stage, but not quite yet, um, but, yeah, like, Bankless will be the first place where we can announce, uh.

• 53:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, we, we cannot wait, and, you know, another thing I, I love to see is, and this is a question that, that came in from, I think, a, a bunch of Bankless folks, uh, actually even coming into this, is, uh, can you talk about your design? Because people get these monolith cards in the mail, and it's a pretty unique experience, experience. It's not like receiving a, you know, a typical, um, debit card, Visa card from, from your local bank, or from like, you know, Capital One here in the US. It is like branded, it is packaged in such a unique way.

• 53:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Can you tell us the the history of of your branding and packaging? And like, what like, just just tell us about the art here. It's super cool.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is just me being completely crazy, basically. I think I think it all stems from what Ethereum really is doing for the world. Right? So, you know, like, back in the day, when David and I, my co-founder David, first met, we met in Taiwan and we were, we, you know, we were partying a lot and talking about Ethereum all night. And around the time we'd watched this movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, right? Which a lot of you probably haven't watched, because it's very old. It's very old from 1968 or 69, Stanley Kubrick movie.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  But in it, there's this big, there's this big black stone that appears every time humanity is transitioning from one stage, from one epoch to the next. Right? You know, like, when, in the beginning of the movie, famously, you see, basically, these monkeys, right? These apes. And they see this big black monolith, the stone. And and that, you know, in the movie, that's the moment they transition into like, early civilization stage, right? And and later, they go from civilization to the space age, and eventually to the singularity. And every time the monolith's there.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  And back when Ethereum had just launched, David and I had watched this movie. And we truly believed that we were witnessing the real life equivalent to Stanley Kubrick's monolith in the form of Ethereum. Right? That Ethereum itself symbolizes this technology.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Which is transcending us from our current age, let's say the the post-French Revolution age, right, into something that I would tangibly say is actually the space age, right? We we we know, only us, only people in our industry, and probably only people who are so deep into Ethereum, like like our listeners and all of us, truly can appreciate the the profound level of change that may be possible because of this goddamn genius that Vitalik, you know, was, and he created Ethereum. Right? Like, like, we, you know, we we fundamentally, if we can change the economy, we will change governance, we can change all aspects of our society,

• 56:31Speaker 02

  and we actually may not die in a nuclear fire by the end of the century. And and that is what, that is ultimately the the the belief that I wanted to convey. Maybe a little bit, you know, maybe it was too much, maybe it was too crazy, but to our current audience, that was the message I wanted to convey visually, where with Monolith, right, we are trying to materialize Ethereum's transcendental potential here. And that's the brand and the vibe we want to carry. And indeed, for describing it for our users, for for listeners, when you get the Monolith box, right, it's covered in artwork, which is, you know,

• 57:16Speaker 02

  kind of hinting of this, you know, futuristic world. And when you, card is suspended, it hangs there in space, and it's supposed to be a Monolith. And our current cards are green, but we are about to launch, well, I mean, I'll say about to launch. We have new cards, and I actually have one here, a production sample. So, and they're in the shape of the portal, the one you can see behind me in the background here.

• 57:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, my God, dude, that is beautiful.

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  That's awesome.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  And so it literally should be that when you open the box, the card is suspended, floating in there. It's kind of a visual illusion, and it's a portal. And, you know, what you're seeing is you're you're seeing a portal to this new Ethereum realm, right? And and the characters, all of these characters, these, you know, these. Um, these characters that we have, and they are you, they are the user. They are what we call the Etherians, these first pioneers of this new realm. People who once were human, right? But who have now stepped into this new realm and have become, you know, almost mutated into these new beings, which you represent as like human, animal, alien hybrids, right?

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Uh, just because, you know, animals are fun.

• 58:30David Hoffman?

  Space squids, yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Space, yeah. And, and, um, yeah, like that, that's what we all should feel like when we're pioneering, when we're using Monolith, when we're pioneering, you know, all the amazing stuff in, in our DeFi economy. Um, anyway, that, that was, that was what we're.

• 58:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's super cool, you know, bankless Visa card is better than the, the black Visa card that all the celebrities have. It is definitely a rite of passage.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's somebody from our Discord actually showing one off.

• 58:59David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 59:04David Hoffman?

  That is cool. That is very cool. Yeah, Mel, I, I love the energy that, that you bring to, uh, to the description of, of how you view Ethereum, and we definitely share, share that vibe as well. Um, so as we come to the, to the conclusion of, of this AMA, what's next for Monolith? Like what, what can users and people expect, uh, to see in the remainder of 2020 and early 2021?

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Um, I think we're, we're rolling out a bunch of features that, um, are quite pressing. Um, we want to make, um, the product really like be the ultimate tool that someone in the DeFi space can use, right? So, um, you know, like we have to solve for gas basically. And we have to solve the people's ability to actually interact with all the DeFi stuff. Um, beyond that, I think what we're currently doing internally.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  We're going through a massive exercise. We have, we have like one very amazing advisor who's got incredible experience in the finance world, who's kind of overseeing the next evolution of Molnith. Where we really in the next year are setting up to achieve the dream I've outlined of creating a DeFi experience that is tailored to someone who doesn't know what the hell DeFi is. And that will deliver them an experience of money that they just can't get anywhere else. That's what we're basically, yeah, like right now most focused on and really excited for.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  And yeah, we're gonna blow everyone away.

• 1:00:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Solid foundation. We are excited to see it. Thanks for hanging with us on this community AMA. You know, Mel, I can't let you leave without asking this last question. I don't know if you're into them, but we kind of like price predictions a little bit here on Bankless, don't we, David? So I'm wondering if you, I'm wondering if you have one. Do you have any price predictions for Ether and Bitcoin? Let's, let's do it in this window, in this next bull run, which we think we are just starting. Call it the next bull run, the next two to three years, price predictions for ETH or Bitcoin.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  So in three years, you're saying?

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  At the peak.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Price in three years?

• 1:01:27David Hoffman?

  At the peak.

• 1:01:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  At the, yeah, let's say peak bull.

• 1:01:29David Hoffman?

  Peak bull, yeah.

• 1:01:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  What's, what's our mountain top? What is our Everest, sir?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  I mean, geez, I haven't made a price prediction in years.

• 1:01:40David Hoffman?

  Now's the time.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why they're fun.

• 1:01:43David Hoffman?

  The gut take. Don't think about it too hard. You're already thinking about it too hard.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I think Vitalik and his cohorts are probably some of the most excellent people in the world. And I am an absolute diehard believer in the fact that Ethereum will succeed. Sure, others may succeed as well, but Ethereum is the one that's best on. And that means that, you know, as the world actually starts to realize what the hell is going on in our space, it's not just about crazy speculation anymore. It is in fact about totally uprooting the nature of our society. No price is really high enough, right? But, but obviously it has to peak somewhere and then it'll all come crashing down.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  And then we're back in, you know, awful, awful times again for a while before it all goes up again. I would say the next mega bull run ETH probably would be. I know, you know, probably like, it'll definitely go over 10,000.

• 1:02:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, 10K, a trillion dollar market cap, right there. Mel, has been a pleasure to have you on the Bankless Community AMA. Please come back sometime and thanks for all the work you guys are doing. We appreciate it.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  I, I super appreciate what you guys are doing for the space and thank you both, David and Ryan, for having me.

• 1:03:04David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  And all the listeners.

• 1:03:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Take care.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Bye bye.