Monolith is one of the few ICO companies in crypto, and possibly the only crypto debit card project to work directly with regulators. They were accepted in the UK's FinTech regulatory (FCA) sandbox which allows new small companies in cutting edge technologies to receive guidance from regulators where the laws and regulations may be grey or not fully defined.

The fact that monolith sought out, and adhered to, regulatory guidance shows their commitment to building a quality business and product. With the draw that many ‘fly by night’ ICO’s have to set up shop in a questionable jurisdiction, it was refreshing to see Monolith address this issue head-on, even if it meant needing to restrict communications outside of the company until the product was ready for public consumption.

Considering the current state of crypto where pump and dumps are common and you often struggle to find product to support or justify valuation, Monolith has made a conscious decision to focus on development where others have erred towards ‘scheme’. Unfortunately, this lack of communication has had an alienating effect on its community, not the least of which has been in leaving the community in the dark on the legal hurdles and various challenges the team has been navigating.

Monolith stuck to its white paper and token fundamentals when most other projects with “value backed” tokens stripped out those benefits once the SEC started applying pressure on various companies due to security token implications.

Think about that for a second… Instead of taking the easy way out like most other companies did, Monolith not only kept their white paper and TKN token fundamentals in-tact, they met the situation head-on through various legal reviews and guidance from the FCA. Even more impressive is their being headquartered in the UK, which has some of the most stringent and restrictive regulations in the FinTech industry. They stood up and fought for the integrity of the token when everyone else preferred not to try. Now Monolith has one of the most unique tokens in all of the industry.

Monolith delivered on the core of the white paper, a non-custodial smart contract wallet paired with a Visa debit card and a TKN token that is backed by accumulating crypto assets.

While the other companies have to spend massive amounts of PR and use gimmicks to get your attention away from how centralized they are, a main reason Monolith has succeeded financially is the avoidance of fake hype and spending on PR for the sake of the token price. The strategic approach to development first allowed them to keep costs low during the development phase with over $25M in runaway remaining.

The CEO said it best and I will loosely quote here: ‘We could have spent $2M a year ago on advertising but at what impact without a product? Or we could spend $2M now [or slightly into the future] as the product is fully realized, and how much more impact would that now have when we could also have services like ETHLend and Compound available through the wallet.’

Monolith is one of the leaders of the London DeFi space, demonstrated in their multiple talks at ETHLondon and relationships with the various local devs who are very interested in connecting with Monolith and the ability to monetize their own project tokens via a VISA debit card.

This is probably one of the most exciting points in that real partnerships and synergy in the DeFi space is what will ultimately make Ethereum successful. Because of the high percentage of failed projects and scams, there seems to be a lot of inherent mistrust in the crypto space, even with developers. Monolith is actively participating in the London developer community, reaching out to various projects, and regulators, inviting them to meetups to discuss ideas and challenges.

Too often devs are only invited to conferences full of shilling and TRON advertising, and Monolith seems to want to change that approach. This authenticity coupled with embracing by being authentic and willing to network with its peers than just thinking in competition terms.

When I take off my community/Discord hat and consider all these above points, I can see a company that is working to build an amazing product, fought for the token fundamentals it believed in, and maintained its integrity in an industry of fake hype where token price pumping is predominant. Yet the fact remains that those who were financial contributors at the TokenCard ICO, to those who bought TKN on the open market, feel like they could have been engaged with more effectively, and it is only because after two years of retrospect can we layout the above bullet points.

So when I and the other moderators who visited Monolith headquarters chatted with Mel, David and team, there was a lot of concern that the community was not as much as a focal point as it should be, and how it could potentially be resolved.