Jordan shared the backstory of MyCrypto and talked about what the next steps for the Ethereum will look like.
Hello! What’s your background, and what are you working on?
I’m Jordan Spence and I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at MyCrypto. Before getting into the blockchain space, I worked in the gaming and esports industries. I had been aware of Bitcoin all the way back in 2013 and even bought a fraction, but it didn’t take me anywhere and I quickly forgot about it. A friend of mine mentioned Ethereum to me one night in March 2017, right as the price of ETH was starting to take off. I quickly bought some and immediately started investing time into learning more about Ethereum and what it offered.
I eventually ran out of spare cash to invest in ETH, so I figured the next best step would be to learn as much as possible and see if I can get involved in the industry. I decided to reach out to MyEtherWallet, mostly by happenstance, and ended up becoming the CMO. I then stuck with the team throughout the brand fork to MyCrypto, and here we are!
MyCrypto is a gateway to the Ethereum blockchain. MyCrypto helps users interact with the blockchain, whether it’s by creating an address for their assets, managing their existing addresses or buying/selling/swapping assets, and offers a whole other slough of tools and features that are useful to various segments of the Ethereum user base.
Throughout MyCrypto’s life, we have striven to constantly improve the methods of interaction with both MyCrypto and the Ethereum blockchain - we do this through better UI/UX, better education, and better security (both on our end and enabling better security for users).
What’s Mycrypto backstory?
MyCrypto is the brainchild of our CEO, Taylor Monahan. She originally helped launch MyEtherWallet back in the day, and we eventually split off to MyCrypto. Taylor participated in the Ethereum presale years ago and when it came time to move her assets to a safe place, the only available instructions told her to use the command prompt on her computer. She then realized a need for a proper GUI, which led to a site called MyEtherWallet being developed.
Over time, Taylor and her co-founder constantly iterated and improved, adding features as requested. The cycle of feedback to development was rapid, and the community quickly gathered to the site as the most accessible option for creating and managing ETH addresses.
The site continued to grow and there was ultimately a split between Taylor and her co-founder occurred. Most of the team stayed on with Taylor to start MyCrypto, which launched in February 2018.
What’s your business model?
To date, MyCrypto has had a few streams of revenue that we adapt as the industry shifts. One of our main routes is through our swap functionality - every transaction you swap via MyCrypto yields a small fee. Additionally, we encourage users to purchase Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets and we receive a fee for every purchase through our affiliate links.
These methods aren’t sustainable long term and we’re actively exploring other streams of revenue that make sense for both us and our users.
The main factors that differentiate MyCrypto from competitors are how lightweight, accessible, and sure our products are. Everything you need to do, you can do it quickly and with confidence.
In an ideal world, the target market for MyCrypto would be everyone… although that’s definitely a cop-out. Right now it feels like we have a large portion of the users who are active within the Ethereum ecosystem - the developers, the maximalists, the educators. Having this core Ethereum user-base is great, and I’d like to expand to those who are less knowledgeable or new to the space. It’d be great for them to start with MyCrypto so they can learn good habits from the beginning and reduce as much risk as possible.
What are your goals for the future?
My personal goal is for MyCrypto to eventually be the only place you need to go to do anything related to Ethereum, whether it’s to make a new address, buy/sell, interact with dapps, smart contracts, etc - anything. And to start with Ethereum, but eventually move onto Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, because after all… we are named MyCrypto. That’s a long way away, though.
What are your future thoughts for the DeFi market?
DeFi is a wonderful next step for the whole of Ethereum to move toward, and is a much healthier attraction than ICOs were.
There’s a unique aspect to this, though, that I wonder about. When it comes to investing and gaining interest, I feel like it’s set-and-forget for most people. It’s not something they’re using daily; it’s not something they think about daily. In that sense, DeFi isn’t a daily driver. It’ll bring in a lot of new people and it will make a handful of organizations become successful, but the rest of the organizations trying to build new things in this industry are going to need some other high tide that raises all ships. ICOs were the previous high tide, and I think DeFi is more of a low tide. What will bring on the next high tide? I’d like to know!
Where can we go to learn more?
MyCrypto’s main product can be found at mycrypto.com, and we have a desktop app available at download.mycrypto.com.
Our latest beta is available at beta.mycrypto.com, and I’d love to get more people testing it out.
Any issues? Check out our Knowledge Base.
We’re very active on Twitter, and we try to post high-quality content as often as possible on our Medium publication.
