Why We Invested in Multis, The Self Custodian Bank for the Digital Era

Written by blackat | Published 2019/09/05
Tech Story Tags: venture-capital | self-custodian-bank | cryptocurrency | cryptocurrency-bank | fintech | multis | gnosis | finance

TLDR Monday Capital has invested in Multis, a self-custaining bank for the digital era. Monday Capital invested with Y Combinator, Coinbase, eFounders and the CEO of Compound. The team believes that easy to use interfaces are as important as innovative technologies and Monday Capital does too. Multis brings to the crypto/digital currencies:Allowances (limits of how much you can spend) Verification (multi-signature up to x-y)Verification (Multi-signatures up to X-Y) Multi-currency (ERC20 tokens for now and more coins coming) Internal exchange (Kyber Network)via the TL;DR App

Why we invested in Multis

We are excited to announce our investment in Multis along with Y Combinator, Coinbase, eFounders and the CEO of Compound.
Multis is a small efficient team that was a part of YC’19 batch. We were extremely happy to meet them before they join, being one of the very few investors to back them while still in YC.
Briefly, Multis is a self custodian bank for the digital era.
In the last few years, we’ve seen tons of lending services, multi-sig wallets, exchanges and many more built in the crypto space. These are amazing steps forward building the new form of banking but the problem is fragmentation and complexity. One company does the lending, another builds multi-sig wallets which are not connected to each other so as to form a simple and complete banking experience for the user. Users and companies need to go into 10 different places to do one thing.
Multis puts all these pieces together without compromising two of the most important parts of this space: security & self custody.
Whatever business owners or everyday people are accustomed to from their online banks that hold fiat, Multis brings to the crypto/digital currencies:
  • Allowances (limits of how much you can spend)
  • Verification (multi-signature up to x-y)
  • Multi-currency (ERC20 tokens for now and more coins coming)
  • Internal exchange (Kyber Network)
  • Savings accounts with interests (Compound)
  • Connect the existing web with crypto (Portis)
And the list will keep growing…
 The team is committed to creating the interfaces we need for this remarkable technology to become useable.
How a business can use Multis
Let’s say you run a bakery with your partner and you want to make a payment to your suppliers instantlyfor 800 USDT. Since this is above your daily allowance of 500 USDT, you submit the payment and then your partner gets an email asking for his approval. If he agrees, he approves the payment and it goes through instantly.
But in case your partner has already made the payment but forgot to update the books, then he can reject your request with a note “already paid sorry”.
A scenario would be when you have a catering event and you need to request your 900 USDT payment. Using Multis, you can request a payment of an exact amount and directly send it to your client. Once you get paid, you will receive an email from Multis, notifying you that funds have arrived.
If your bakery business has some savings just sitting on your business account you can also lend those funds and get great returns just with a tap of a button.
In other words, your bakery business can store their crypto, pay suppliers, run payroll, and earn interest. Just like regular checking and savings accounts.
The elephant in the room: Easy to use products
Besides a brilliant product that we use from day 0, Multis represents something that is written in the genes of Monday Capital:
It’s the first prime example of how a young team can abstract the noise of an exploding market and focus on what’s important: User Experience.
Multis took a very basic and widely used concept — a secure multi-signature smart contract wallet from Gnosis — and built on top of it. They built the interfaces needed to make this powerful technology useful, exposing features and use cases that exist but were unusable due to complexity or lack of the interfaces. The team believes that easy to use interfaces are as important as innovative technologies. And Monday Capital does too.

You can follow Multis progress here MultisHQ.

This post was originally published on Monday Capital’s website.


Written by blackat | Founding partner at Monday Capital. Engineer. Previously, founder of Sunshine, an AI company.
Published by HackerNoon on 2019/09/05