TL;DR
- ether.fi Cash is a mobile wallet + Visa credit card.
- Spending money using the card either borrows USDC against your ether.fi assets or swaps them into USDC for instant settlement — your choice!
- The card pays off itself using your Stake and Liquid rewards if you like!
- You will be able to use the card anywhere in the world.
- Sign up now to get 1000 ether.fi Cash points and get on the waitlist.
Cash is the third in our Trilogy of products — ether.fi Stake, ether.fi Liquid, and ether.fi Cash. Combined these integrated products help users save, invest and spend their crypto, making it so that users never have to offramp again.
Our mission is to make DeFi accessible and easy for normal people. Why are we doing this? Let’s start with a quick history lesson.
A brief history of the world:
In the beginning people could store their wealth by holding seashells or precious metals. If someone wanted to take another person’s metals they’d need to club them over the head. Clubbing people was a lot of work and seashells were easy to hide, so this wealth storage system worked pretty well.
Then governments were formed with organized club wielders who would go around clubbing people (or threatening to club them) to grab their precious metals and put them in big central coffers.
Then America was founded where the people could have their own clubs (or guns) and prevent the government from taking their stuff (or at least make it awkward.)
Then America sneakily replaced everyones gold with paper, and spent all the gold on endless wars and stimmy checks. They called this MMT and inexplicably no one seemed to notice, and many people actually thought this was good.
So now there was no need for clubbing or awkward threats because the government could just spend everyone’s wealth without permission.
This wasn’t great so Satoshi invented Bitcorns which let people hold their wealth in flash drives and again made it hard to take people’s stuff.
Finally, Vitalik came up with Ethereum which let people make programmable Bitcorns so that people could lever up 100x and earn points and do some other things. This was called DeFi.
DeFi Today
DeFi today is a collection of ultra narrow products that are designed for hyper financial degens who want to build their own strategies and complex derivatives.
This is similar to the early days of personal computing when the default was that people would assemble their own machine by picking out the motherboard, CPU, sound card etc. This was fun for many of the early adopters but not really appropriate for normal people.
Just like DeFi today is totally inscrutable to the average person.
The Future
Giving people control over their wealth is a core part of our mission. We want to make it easy to navigate DeFi while giving users all the benefits of crypto:
- Self-custody
- Transparency
- Censorship resistance
Over time protocols are going to need to provide a suite of integrated products and abstract away the complexities of DeFi including chains, derivatives, and strategies. They are going to resemble consumer products that focus on bringing value to the user.
For ether.fi staking was just the beginning and now with the launch of Liquid and Cash we’re closer than ever to our end state vision. That being said there is much more that needs to be done.
Reliance on TradFi payment rails is still a major censorship risk and a usability nightmare. Reliance on USD as the unit of account chains crypto to a perpetually inflating shitcoin minted by the Federal Reserve.
Both of these issues are going to need to be addressed over the coming years and they form a big part of our roadmap in the next leg of our journey.
Get ready for ether.fi, normies.
