Hi there 👋 , we’re excited to come out of our shell and share with you the story of Seashell.
Before we introduce ourselves, let’s jump back thousands of years to explore the origin of money, highlight some critical issues about today’s financial world, and share why we’re building Seashell to be the smart and simple solution that you’ve been waiting for.
How it all started
Back in ancient times, seashells were used as one of the earliest forms of money, predating the use of metals like gold and silver as currency (fun fact, the Chinese character for money is shaped like a seashell 貝). Seashells worked well because they were convenient to carry and unable to be replicated–consumers could trade with seashells instead of needing to lug around crops or livestock.
Over the years, the dominant form of currency later evolved from seashells to metal coins to paper bills–and today, it’s making the shift from electronic records to digital tokens, enabling the flow of money to continue on nights, weekends, and holidays. At Seashell, we’re excited about building the next evolution of money, but we know that we can’t just rebuild the same inequitable system that we have today.
If you pop open the hood of traditional banks, you’ll discover that they make two-thirds of their fee revenue from overdraft fees and other “insufficient funds” penalties [source]. These penalties are a crucial source of revenue for the multi-trillion dollar industry, but unfortunately, they are the opposite of consumer-friendly. Naturally, banks are preying on the customers with less money in their accounts–the dirty truth is that these vulnerable customers have become a core revenue source for banks.
Another way that banks make revenue is by taking your cash deposits and loaning them out for interest. That’s not necessarily a bad thing–they’re putting your idle money to work and giving you interest in return. However, the fundamental problem with this system is that you’re hardly getting any interest from your cash deposit. Nationally, the average interest rate for saving accounts is 0.08% [source]. That’s over 100x lower than the rising prices of goods, which was 7.0% in 2021 [source]. Unfortunately, it seems that your “savings” account isn’t quite saving you anything–due to rising prices, your money can’t buy as much as it used to.
Introducing Seashell
We’ve completed a $6M seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Kindred Ventures, and also included Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev, Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban, unicorn investor Elad Gil, former CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo, Coinbase Ventures, and founders of Web3 projects including Solana, Avalanche, and Polygon.
Let’s grow together
Follow us on Twitter to stay afloat on the latest updates.
The future of finance involves you, and we’re excited to be embarking on this journey together.
- Daryl Hok, Founder & CEO 🐚
To learn more about Seashell, visit seashell.com or follow us at @getSeashell.
This information was last updated July 7, 2022.
