Paul Puey on Edge wallet and controlling your own private keys

0:23the original crypto people and you've been working on airbits in now Edge for a long time and then tell us a little bit about how Edge got started oh gosh let's see how can I keep that into a hopefully not too long a period of time but myself I'm a graduate from Berkeley engineering student worked in Silicon Valley for almost a decade primarily at Nvidia that was kind of the

0:45last job in Tech before leaving for about 10 years doing small business and then discovering cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2013 where I just you know like many people say went down the rabbit hole and became the worst employee at my job at that time and had to had to leave a job that I love to focus on cryptocurrency and that was my re-entry back into Tech where I saw what

1:06existed and I saw what needed to get built and what could be built and said I think we can improve this industry we can build some better software and easier Solutions and then launched edge with a handful of co-founders in late 2013 early 2014 and we've been building since and you know there's a short and a long story Into the transition and Edge but it's been a great Rebrand and

1:28new product that we're very excited about that's awesome Paul and what would you say is the thing that differentiates Edge the most from other crypto wallets and applications got it so I'll try to pick the two or three things that differentiate it the most number one which is why we rebranded Edge in the first place is the way we do security fundamentally we do security very

1:47differently than most other cryptocurrency apps in that we take private keys and while still allowing people to own and control their money we encrypt and secure and back up those keys automatically for the user where they don't have to deal with seeing 24 words writing something down on a piece of paper or encrypting a file all of that is hidden from them they just

2:10simply create an account and log in that was what it was like in heritz that's what it's like in Edge and then fundamentally after that the architecture of edge is very very modular it's allowed us to quickly incorporate many different blockchains even on mobile that many other Walts just have struggled with including things like Monero and ripple Stellar

2:29and soon another you know almost non-existent blockchain on other wallets we're about to incorporate and launch next week second in that modularity is the fact that we're very modular in incorporating exchanges so we've we've got shape shift Chang L change now to do crypto to crypto exchanges and we have a really really cool integration where the app

2:53will directly access multiple exchanges to find the best price for whatever currency you're trying to swap at the amount that you want to swap swap you know for the pair that you want to swap so that eliminates the users from trying to figure out which service to use even has the currency pair available so it automatically hunts it best price and we're able to plug in more of those

3:12exchanges pretty easily as well as Fiat to crypto exchanges we have almost a Dap browser plug-in architecture right now we only have Simplex which does credit card but soon we'll have other currency other exchanges to be able to do purchasing and selling you know on ramping via bank transfer around the world via VIA half a dozen different partners wow that's awesome and that was

3:35part of my next question was you know a lot of people think of crypto Wallet app as just you can store your coins you can receive some funds and you can send them but it sounds like you guys are really taken to the next level being able to purchase U an exchange and between multiple exchanges that actually sounds like an amazing feature and one thing

3:52that I know about exchanges is sometimes you guys have to do a kyc depending on how much the amount of funds you trans through exchanges do you guys have like a single system that allows people to onboard or do they have to kyc for each individual services on that or how does that work right so for today some Services simply don't require kyc such as change Le and change now

4:17shape shift does Simplex does and so right now you do have to kyc with each of the services you use for the most part with the Fiat onramps we expect most people to have one at most two services that they use because we'll partner with the different fat onramps in different countries so if you're in Europe you'll use that one if you're in the US you'll use a different one but

4:34you're not really going to kyc with both yeah right makes sense so for the most part you won't have to do a lot of kyc you'll do it once or twice and then you're kind of done now one very cool unique thing about Edge versus other wallets is we encrypt and backup private keys for the user well guess what it doesn't have to be in private keys that we encrypt and back up it can actually

4:53be other information and when you use Edge you'll notice you can tag transactions with a little bit of information like who did I pay what's the category some notes the Fiat value all of that is also encrypted and backed up no one can see that data but you well we're we aimed to in 2019 to also make it where the kyc information that you'd be sending into exchanges also gets

5:14encrypted and backed up with your account and that'll allow you to send that information to other services if you need to kyc with other exchanges or any other services making it way easier than having to fill in your email or phone number passport for sure you know over and over again you just hit a button to approve it we basically become like a password manager built into your

5:33into your wallet that's amazing and I know a lot of people would like to streamline that process so I'm glad that you guys are doing a great job there so you know my father interviewed you back in 2014 inside Bitcoins and back then you guys had one of the most popular wallets still and I'm curious now how big is your guys' community and how many active users do you guys have

5:55on edge right now got it so Community wise we're you know between 500 and a million we'll say within that range of accounts created on the platform and depending on the price of crypto the amount of accounts that we're acquiring can range anywhere from 500 to like 3,000 accounts a day just because when the price is up people want to get in you know and so it's

6:16definitely quite a lot of a lot of volatility in the acquisition I think every company sees that you know you'll hear of many companies saying wow we're getting this many accounts a day especially in the in the in the times of huge interest in cryptocurrency so we've got a pretty wide range you know but in the in the lull and slowest days when there's you know no one's

6:35really talking about crypto we'll see like three to 500 accounts getting created a day worldwide and so our goal in 2019 is to grow that even in the lull and I think the stuff that's getting added to Edge such as the new exchange Integrations make Edge very relevant in many different countries for more than just holding but now for

6:53actually acquiring and sending and one of our big goals is to be a globally recognized brand where wherever you are all you have to know or recommend to people is Edge and will'll be able to connect you with the right exchange inside of the app to buy crypto and it be non-custodial the entire way through definitely and it's great to hear that there's still a lot of people

7:13signing up you know when the prices are down of course the market being up helps you guys but to be a global brand you also need a lot of marketing are you guys you know putting Capital into marketing or are you looking for more organic growth and were you guys able to still get a lot of users in 2018 although the Market was downtrending most of the year 2018 definitely the

7:34early half of the Year we acquiring quite a bit of quite a bit of users that was kind of the tail end of the big spike you know and then things start to tail off and then it's been steady actually since like you know early q1 or early Q2 of 2018 it's been pretty steady so we haven't what I call dipped you know since then so it's been pretty

7:52steady to slightly up and our big Focus for kind of the marketing initiative you know as we are in kind of this bare Market we want to be very resourceful and wisely use the funds that we do have so one of things that we do on the marketing initi is really try to capture the thought Leaders The Advocates the evangelists the people that organize meetups that set people up

8:13with wallets and you know to some degree I travel for conferences but I also love traveling for meetups and getting to meet those people and connect with them show them the value out of Edge and then and then potentially sponsor the meetups and give and offer them a little bit of crypto to onboard new users send them the first few dollars of crypto for the

8:29new users that come in through the doors and so we SP we sponsor maybe half a dozen if not more meetups around the world and that's where we'd like to focus some of our efforts in the short term that's great we think it's paying for the buck that's awesome and I know you guys are working on a lot of additional features coming up here but I want to talk a little bit about

8:49the revenue streams for Edge right now you guys probably have I know you guys since you have a couple different features do you guys have a couple different revenue streams and are you looking at adding more revenue streams as you integrate more features right so we have two primary revenue streams one is our licensing of the technology so our SDK is a licens SDK

9:09for people that use it white label it put it in their own app or build their app entirely based on edge like a wh labeled wallet with you some added functionality that's their own and that's one of our revenue streams is just basically licensing out the tech and the second one is simply the revenue we get in the application from these exchange Integrations so any integration

9:27that we put into the app we rev share with the part partner that's providing that service and so we're excited about that as our large growth opportunity a lot of people right now think wallets don't have of any any place in the space for revenue and it's all exchanges but what they don't realize is that going forward as especially as crypto becomes

9:46useful and people go get into it first for utility then their first touch point with crypto is the wallet it's not the exchange and the exchange kind of starts to take a backseat and since wallets can integrate with the exchanges we have a bit more control if which exchanges get integrated and therefore can command a bit more of that rev share and so

10:05while it's not that case today I think it's it's migrating in that direction which is why you're seeing you know some for one thing some Acquisitions of wallet wallet projects by the exchanges as well as exchanges looking at offering API so that wallets can connect to them in the first place so this I think is a transition we're going to start to see

10:22over the next you know three to five years as well it's taking a higher kind of level of priority in ecosystem and in people's minds than where they were before that's great and have you guys considered you know with exchanges and all these big players and institutions coming into the market you know the potential of merges and Acquisitions with Edge and other

10:43companies with any startup it's always on the mind it's what it's not the first thing it's not our first Target goal we just want to build and get a great product into people's hands that's the first order of business but from the Viewpoint of being a company and a startup with investors it's something that's it's in the back of our mind you know and I feel like

11:01we've built a team and a product that you know if we were interested in acquisition we could easily have someone interested that's great so let's go back a little bit to when you talked about the exchange Integrations and you guys also have some other updates coming for 2019 in terms of development could you recap you know what are the users of the app going to be receiving

11:22In the near term and you know when are these developments coming out so in the near term we've got a launch going out next week which will incorporate you know a major top 10 market cap cryptocurrency as well as another way for people to acquire crypto with a partnership directly inside of the app you know to complement the current integration which is simplex

11:41with credit card around the world will give you a cheaper option many people complain about the you know the six plus percent fee of service like Simplex and while they complaint I give it I give it a lot of respect because it's very fast you know in 10 to 30 minutes you have crypto in your wallet you can't really get that with most other services

11:58so but we're are providing a cheaper alternative that will be on the order of 1% fees via bank transfer so that's that's coming out literally about next week road map for rest of the year as i' mentioned probably by Q2 our goal is to have and we think we can easily accomplish this by Q2 have everywhere from like Canada to parts of Latin America Brazil and I was it Panama a

12:25lot of Europe Switzerland and Australia all covered to be able to buy and sell crypto with an edge that's nearly 40 countries and it's possible some other Partnerships will show up as we go to conferences and we'll have even more than that and so that's going to be the big Focus over the next you know q1 Q2 of this year and then probably later in into the year Q3 Q4 one of the

12:47things that we really want to focus on is Integrations with our SDK going into apps similar how we have auger using the edge SDK for their dap we'd really love to push that and developer resources on Integrations of our SDK into many other daps we feel like by the end of 2019 some daps will really start to gain some some good action we'd love to see

13:09Edge integrated into those that's great I'm looking forward to those updates and hopefully we can recap another interview when something big comes out and we can see how you guys are flourishing so are you guys looking for more people to join the team help in other ways or you just looking for more people to use the edge app right now and also how can people you know get a

13:30hold of you got it definitely for people to use the edge app we want to hear feedback get people using it see how the how the platform scales people have any questions you know reach us at edge.a there's links to Telegram and Twitter and Facebook on the bottom of our website there's also links to download the app itself And subscribe for our newsletter you can get updates

13:50on when we've got new functionality and features in the app as well as great content that we push out every week on just the state of the industry features new coins new protocols state of Regulation we try to keep people well informed in the industry as a whole as well VI our newsletter so definitely edge. app that's that's kind of the easy way to get touch with us in

14:10all the different facets of Social and content awesome thank you Paul P CEO and co-founder of Edge app it was a pleasure speaking to you today I'm looking forward to the updates in Edge in the coming time here and good luck at Bitcoin Miami and the other events you're attending this year and I look forward to speaking to you soon cool thanks a lot Ashton