On the 2nd of July 2020, our CEO Kris Marszalek had a Live AMA session with the Huobi Team.
Huobi: Hello everyone! Welcome to the Huobi Global Telegram AMA. We are hosting Crypto.com today. It’s a great honor and privilege to welcome Kris Marszalek Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Crypto.com.
Kris: Hi Emeka – thanks for having me, a pleasure to be here with the community.
I am the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Crypto.com. I’m a lifelong entrepreneur. I love building great teams and then building great products for consumers. Our 4th anniversary was just two days ago, 30th of June 2020 and I am very fortunate to have amazing teams that deliver outstanding products & services to our 2M+ customers across the globe.
Huobi: Thank you, Kris. Happy 4th Anniversary to Crypto.com! Now I would request you to present a brief introduction about Crypto.com before taking questions from the community.
Kris: Crypto.com was founded in 2016 on a simple belief: it’s a basic human right for everyone to control their money, data, and identity. In the recent decade, those rights have unfortunately been eroded and are now clearly under threat. Blockchain technology, and the cryptocurrency built upon it, can provide people with the ability to regain control, control of their money, data and identity.
Our vision is “Cryptocurrency in Every Wallet” and we’re bringing it to life with a number of products:
1/ Crypto.com App
Crypto.com App, the best place to send and track cryptocurrencies.
2/ Payments
We addressed this with a) the MCO Visa card, a metal card with no annual fees and up to 5% cashback; and b) Crypto.com Pay (powered by the Crypto.com Chain and CRO), which enables users to pay and be paid in any crypto, anywhere, for free using their mobile phone.
3/ Financial Services
We addressed this with a) Crypto Earn which gives users the freedom to grow their crypto assets and earn interest. Users can earn up to 8% p.a. on cryptocurrencies and up to 12% p.a. for stablecoins. b) Crypto Credit which allows users to instantly get a loan by depositing their crypto assets as collateral.
So it’s a whole suite of products that help drive crypto adoption globally
Huobi: Thanks for the brief introduction. Shall we start the AMA now?
Kris: Yes, sure.
Huobi: I will start by asking questions from our Twitter community.
Huobi: Q1. Crypto.com has launched a series of products and services that seem to be the substitutes of the current banking system, such as wallet, card, credit, and earn. Can you explain how these products work and how they can resolve the problems of current banks?
Kris: On top of our core products providing access and spend-ability of cryptocurrency, we have developed a suite of powerful financial products on our Crypto.com App to bring more value to our customers.
Crypto.com offers five tiers of MCO Visa cards that feature no annual or monthly fees, 100% rebate on Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Prime, airport lounge access for select cards, no-fee ATM withdrawals, tap-and-pay functionality, and competitive interbank rates.
Then you’ve got the interest account – Crypto.com Earn. Crypto Earn enables our customers to grow their crypto and gives them up to 18% p.a. earning on 27 coins including BTC, ETH, LTC, XRP, BNB, TUSD, PAX, USDC, TGBP, TCAD, TAUD, MCO, BAT, LINK, CRO, MKR, DAI, PAXG, EOS, XLM, ATOM, XTZ, BCH, VET, ICX, ADA & ENJ.)
Crypto Credit gives our customers spending power by enabling them to instantly get a loan by depositing crypto (BTC, CRO, MCO, XRP, ETH, LTC, EOS, XLM) as collateral. You can receive the amount of credit in a stablecoin of your choice (TUSD, PAX, USDC or USDT).
Basically as a platform, we generate yield on Credit and offer solid interest rates on Earn.
Huobi: Q2. Crypto.com has two tokens – CRO and MCO. Can you explain the different use cases and the utility or use of these two tokens?
Kris: MCO is the utility token which is used to get access to the MCO Visa card and for additional benefits within the Crypto.com App.
CRO is the native token of Crypto.com Chain enabling transactions worldwide between merchants and cryptocurrency users — seamless, secure and cost-efficient. Users can pay with Crypto.com Pay and earn up to 20% cashback paying merchants online and offline. We recently integrated Crypto.com Pay to the Ledger online store, Ledger will now accept CRO, along with BTC, LTC, ETH and XRP through Crypto.com Pay.
In the Crypto.com App, users can purchase major brand gift-cards and earn up to 20% cashback when paying with CRO. That’s been quite popular recently as the selection includes a number of major brands.
Huobi: Q3. The Blockchain project has a lot of potentials. What are the differences and advantages of Crypto.com (MCO Visa Card) compared to other projects that also issue Visa Cards?
Kris: First of all, we’re the only company that ships cards globally – in the US, Asia, and in 31 European markets.
Secondly, the card itself is simply better than anything the banks have on offer today.
Credit card products there are expensive. And they usually offer low cashback rates. Our card’s value proposition fits right in. No annual/monthly fees, up to 5% cashback in crypto. There are a bunch of perks that come on top of that, like 100% rebate on Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Prime, airport lounge access for select cards, no-fee ATM withdrawals, tap-and-pay functionality, and competitive interbank rates.
You can always download our app or go to the website to check it out — crypto.com/en/cards.
Huobi: Q4. There are many projects that are considered big competitors of CRO. Why should users choose CRO for the best choice? In your opinion, what are the biggest differences and advantages that CRO brings when compared to others?
Kris: Great question.
I think our go-to-market strategy is a clear differentiator. Other startups ten to focus on hardcore tech or stats like TPS, while we build products people will actually use.
There are four disruptive forces that underpin our strategy:
- great offers for customers to financially incentivize usage of crypto;
- no transaction fees for merchants;
- seamless user experience;
- decentralized protocol to process the transactions.
On the tech front, our blockchain team has developed innovative technology to provide low latency, secure and privacy-protected solutions catered for mobile payment.
So it’s a complete package. I encourage everyone to go through our whitepaper, or at the very least follow us on twitter — there is massive progress on this front every day.
Huobi: Q5. Nowadays DeFi is changing our relationship with money, investing, credit, and debt . So, how do you think of the future of DeFi? What are the factors that CRO could make a difference since there are a lot of projects involved in DeFi?
Kris: DeFi is definitely one of the hottest trends this year.
There are a lot of exciting features coming on top of the Chain to power DeFi services: cross-currencies exchange, crypto loans and staking contracts are some of the features the team is working on.
We’ve recently launched our non-custodial wallet app, which we want to be the best place to enjoy all the DeFi services with great UX and security that you would expect from a Crypto.com product.
We are excited to share more with our community on this soon!
Huobi: Q6. Marketing is the leading factor that helps the project thrive. So what is your strategy to attract customers and developers to CRO in the long term?
Kris: Well, there is something you need before you actually begin with any marketing and that is a rockstar product that people love.
As we are developing the Chain technology, we already launched 3 use cases for online merchant integration, in-App gift card purchase and peer-to-peer payments.
There’s more users and more merchants joining the platform every day, so it’s only a matter of time before we reach critical mass.
We are also developing a comprehensive ecosystem of industry-leading players that will be supporting the Chain project, e.g., Settlement Agents (e.g., OSL), Stablecoin Partners (TUSD, PAXOS), Validator Partners (e.g., Huobi Pool) and Technology Partners (e.g., Intel, Tendermint)
Huobi: Q7. How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well? Do you have local communities for them to let them better understand about your project?
Kris: We’ve recently hit the 2m users milestone, so I’m very thankful for the support of our global community. Having a group of passionate early adopters is key to building a strong brand.
We actively listen to our community and gather feedback on our product as well as ideas for new features through our social media channels like Telegram or Discord. The feedback we’re gathering from the community helps us make our products better and improve the company as a whole.
In order to scale this and go local, we now have 20+ local communities on Telegram. There’s a bunch of events around that – including Telegram Madness.
Most important, all our products are being fully localized as we speak:
- all key languages will be available this year
- local language support
- local payment methods & currencies
So the Telegram groups are only the first step.
Huobi: Q8. COVID 19 has slowed many economies around the world but as a crypto business has it affected you negatively or positively? Secondly, are you still on track to achieve your targets as the road map says?
Kris: I think we’re quite fortunate to have experienced massive growth this year, in spite of the fact that we’ve been working 100% remotely since January 25th.
There’s a few reasons for that…
1. Crypto was built for a crisis like this and there is tremendous interest, particularly in Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation and massive quantitative easing (aka Money Printer Goes Brrrr)
2. We could actually run in remote work forever without losing much in terms of output. THere is no physical supply chain to speak of here.
3. Our users can interact with our platform from the comfort of their couch, which they did a lot this year.
So the bottom line is: we’re quite lucky. And we felt since we are in a fortunate position like this, it’s our responsibility to give back to our community. So we’ve launched something called #3for3 in early April:
- 3.5% credit/debit card fee waiver for cryptocurrency purchases in the Crypto.com App
- MCO Visa Card – Up to 10% increased rebates for essential purchases (food, groceries and delivery). Please visit here.
- Crypto.com Pay – Double rewards on gift card purchases of food delivery and groceries (Up to 20%)
We just extended it for another 3 months (till the end of September). It’s our way of doing what we can to help. As for the vast majority of people, times are really tough.
Huobi: Q9. We often hear that some cryptocurrency platforms experience data theft and abuse by hackers, talking about the quality of the crypto.com platform’s security. How confident crypto.com to solve this issue?
Kris: Security always comes first. We’ve invested over 4 years into people, technology and processes to safeguard our customers funds and their data.
Crypto.com is built on a solid foundation of security, privacy and compliance and is the first cryptocurrency company in the world to have CCSS Level 3, ISO 27001:2013 and PCI:DSS 3.2.1, Level 1 compliance. We also recently achieved ISO/IEC 27701:2019 Certification, the “Gold standard” privacy certification.
Around 10% of our global team (which currently stands at a little over 400 people) is dedicated to security. It’s a solid setup, which was audited by top firms, like Kudelski Security. Also, we’ve recently secured direct insurance coverage…
As of today we have accumulated a total of $360 million worth of insurance to cover the potential loss in cold storage. So it’s not trivial. There’s a good place with an overview of our entire setup on the website.
So to answer your question — we think we’ve got one of the most secure platforms today and we will continue investing to make sure we are pushing the envelope in this aspect for the entire industry.
Huobi: Q10. What are some future plans for Crypto.com?
Kris: Great question.
We’re 100% focused on completing our ecosystem buildout now.. Payments, trading, finance, all key products and use cases. We want to be fully prepared for the new Bitcoin ATH, which I believe is coming next year.
If we look at the long term prospects of the company, our goal right now is to go from 2 million users today to 100 million users in five years time. That’s the goal we set internally.
This clear objective defines how we think about our product roadmap, how we think about our community build out, how we think about attracting the right people who will help us get there.
And it’s an extremely, incredibly fascinating journey to go from a small startup of just a few guys with an idea on a napkin to now 400 people, and with an opportunity to have real impact on this industry.
Huobi: Thanks for answering questions from Twitter Community, Kris.
Kris: Thanks for everyone who tuned in for the AMA.
