MyCrypto: Q&A

Jordan Spence — Chief Marketing Officer

1. Who is behind MyCrypto? Backgrounds?

MyCrypto is founded by Taylor Monahan who originally co-founded MyEtherWallet. Our CTO is Daniel, our Operations are handled by George, and our CMO is Jordan (me!). We were all previously at MyEtherWallet as well. We have a range of developers and security people and a support and education team that keeps everything moving and keep an eye on our products and the ecosystem 24/7. More info about our team can be found here: https://about.mycrypto.com/

2. Why is it extremely important to use a Hardware Wallet?

The biggest attack vector right now in cryptocurrency is private key phishing, or gathering someone’s private key in some way. A hardware wallet doesn’t expose your private key to a website or your computer or your phone or anything. Instead, your private key lives within the device. Currently, it’s the safest option and there’s really no excuse not to have one.

3. From what vectors does MyCrypto protect us?

MyCrypto’s web interface currently does its best to get people to stop using private keys, JSON files, and mnemonic phrases. Eventually, we will stop allowing the use of private keys on MyCrypto.com altogether because of how prone to phishing they are. When that happens, the only way you would be able to use your private key with MyCrypto is with the MyCrypto Desktop App. With the desktop apps, you only have to download it once instead of navigating to a website each time. This reduces the risk of phishing and attacks on the DNS system, both which can result in your coins being compromised.

4. What are MyCrypto’s vulnerabilities and how can we avoid them?

Well… if we knew of vulnerabilities then we would fix them! We do take the security of our products very seriously. We have very detailed internal policies and workflows to ensure our people are secure. We work with security auditors like Cure53 to audit our products and with HackerOne to make sure there are always people looking for new attack vectors. MyCrypto has no known vulnerabilities, and I would guesstimate that over 99% of the losses and victims in the space are due to things like phishing sites and Twitter scams. One could argue that us allowing people to use private keys on the website could be seen as a vulnerability, which is why we are working on changing that.

5. Why did most of the team split from MEW to MyCrypto?

Nineteen out of twenty of the team members from MyEtherWallet left to start MyCrypto. I don’t speak on behalf of them, but I personally left because from my perspective there were two co-founders: one who was passionate, communicative, smart, reliable, and a good leader, and the other one who I met once, who disappeared for months, who never interacted with the team, and who stopped doing any work. The former is Taylor. We would have been eager to continue working with the other co-founder and moving the organization forward together, but it didn’t seem like that was what he wanted to do. Our hand was forced and we all left, and now we’re in a much better place.

6. Why is MyCrypto superior to MEW?

Superior is subjective, and we like to let our products speak for themselves. I’m not sure what the MEW team is up to, but we’re working hard to keep improving our products. I can tell you that the MyCrypto.com you see now is massively superior to the MyCrypto.com that launched in February. We just launched MyCrypto 1.0 which has a completely rebuilt codebase and a laundry list of new features. Keep an eye on our progress by watching our Medium!

7. Why does MEW seem to get attacked all the time, unlike MyCrypto?

Simply put, MEW has a bigger target on their backs. We’re able to lie low with a smaller community, but the time will come where we’re attacked as well. We just started to see Twitter scammers piggybacking on our tweets, and that’s likely a sign of what’s to come.

8. What is the business model of MyCrypto? How does it make money?

Currently MyCrypto is sustained off of three sources of revenue. First, we have partnerships with ShapeShift and Coinbase (for the ShapeShift swap tab and the Coinbase Buy widget) and take a portion of the transaction fees that are yielded through their services. Second, we’re partnered with all of the major hardware wallets and get a portion of the sales that go through our affiliate links. Last, we get donations every now and then!

We’re also actively exploring more avenues for income, but in ways that make sense for both us and our users. A good example of this might be with ENS domain sales or with scheduled transactions via Chronologic.

To be honest, the donations help a ton and we’re committed to continue building free, open-source software.

9. What does the MyCrypto roadmap look like? What is MyCrypto working on?

MyCrypto doesn’t currently have a public roadmap but we’re pretty vocal about the things we’re interested in working on. All of the items on this Twitter poll are things that we want to do eventually, and are all in progress in one way or another. The results of that Twitter poll also mirror our general priorities.

10. What will the future of crypto safety will look like?

That’s a great question, and one I don’t have a great answer to. I will say that the future of crypto safety is a future where people are buying, selling, trading, interacting, and transacting seamlessly without having to take multiple steps or go find private keys or anything like that.

11. What will MyCrypto do to help crypto go mainstream?

MyCrypto has already started with the name MyCrypto. It’s ambiguous in a good way. It’s easy to understand and eventually we’d love for you to go to MyCrypto to do anything you need to do with the blockchain. On a serious note, we’re looking to help create the seamless experiences that I mentioned in the previous answer. User experience is going to be a huge factor for every organization in the cryptocurrency industry and we hope MyCrypto can be a driving force to better those user’s experiences.

We want everyone to easily access the blockchain; products have to pass not only the mom test, but the grandma test. We’ll get there one day!

Many thanks to Jordan for his time.

Never a dull moment in crypto. I wrote this once, and will share with you again as history repeats:

“What fascinates me about the crypto/blockchain is that no single project or coin has guaranteed success, competition is maddening. If you fall asleep in your laurels, or if your initial idea doesn’t have every aspect covered on the problem you were trying to solve, someone WILL, be exceeding expectations, someone will innovate and take away your lunch money.”

This being said I will put my bet that MyCrypto will be the #1 open-source, client-side crypto interface.

WHY? Well, when the same 19 out of 20 team members, move on trying to accomplish the mission and vision they intended to deliver on their previous “setup”, something was evidently not aligned and/or not OK on that previous “setup”.

I will not delve into the MEW vs. MyCrypto drama or history. But for good references read the below articles.

If you enjoy the read, follow me on Twitter, is good for Karma.