Metal/Proton — Telegram QUIZ & AMA — May 12
On Tuesday, May 12, we had the pleasure to welcome to our Telegram chat:
Marshall Hayner, co-founder, and CEO of Proton.
He single-handedly answered all our questions on the development of Proton and Metal currently ranked 363 on CoinMarketCap.
Some sentences have been slightly edited for readability but the meaning has been conserved.
Summary
In this 10 hour-long AMA, Marshall Hayner, CEO of Metal Pay took us through the captivating story behind how he got involved in the crypto industry, and the advent of Metal Pay and Proton.
Marshall grew his first company to a million users in a few weeks back in 2014.
Metal Pay is a global digital banking and payments platform that runs on the Proton blockchain. It’s the only banking platform in the world that directly integrates cryptocurrency. This allows the blockchain to directly interact with Visa/Mastercard and your bank.
He also expanded on the virtues of the Metal Pay platform and the Proton chain and how his fee-less product will give well-established names like PayPal and Apple Pay a run for their money.
Metal supports 4 to 5k TPS and human readable addresses such as @name. They already have over 250k users registered on the platform. So far, they made two acquisitions and grew their team to over 35 people.
In 2020, they plan to have finished all fifty states’s money transmission licensing for the US.
Their long term vision: Metal is the next Stripe.
Introduction
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Can you tell us what you did before crypto, how you got into crypto, and if you’ve had any other venture in crypto previous to being involved with Metal/Proton?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: My story in crypto started 11 years ago when I lived in Boston, MA when I first discovered cryptocurrency. I was one of the lucky few who stumbled on it as it was actively unfolding on p2pfoundation.net. I was obsessed with BitTorrent at the time and decentralized communities and was actively moderating many private torrent trackers.
Trent Reznor showed up on what.cd in 2009 and asked “How can I get paid for releasing my album on this platform?” At first, I thought it was a fake account so I went to ban it and lock the thread but then Trent tweeted under his blue checkmark verified Twitter account “verifying what.cd”.
So I fanboyed out and watched the thread unfold with all kinds of zany ideas on how he could be paid for releasing his new album on what.cd. Every idea was horrible and then towards the end of the thread someone said “what about bitcoin”, I googled it, downloaded the original Bitcoin-QT client and my journey started.
I spent the first few weeks trying to figure out how it works, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that it didn’t directly integrate into any existing banking software. This is like the obscure internet. I like it.
When I finally got it, I thought “wow this is the BitTorrent of money”. And as you know BitTorrent gave birth to all of the most popular streaming platforms we use today such as Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc.
This is what crypto is doing to money, it started with Bitcoin, evolved with Ethereum, metamorphosed with Proton, became accessible with MTL and we’re only getting started.
My first company QuickCoin started in 2013 and officially launched in 2014, it was a Facebook integrated Bitcoin wallet, the first really simple one-click signup and setup we had ever seen. That quickly grew to a million users in a few weeks in the first quarter of 2014, from there I ended up leaving and joining the Stellar launch team and ran all marketing/PR/Community and strategy around the Stellar wallet. Stellar wallet grew to a million users in under a week. Within a few months I got the itch and left Stellar to join Block.io where I met my current co-founder Glenn Marien.
I advised a bunch of projects and got heavily involved with Dogecoin at the time and helped organize Dogecoin, Doge on Nascar, etc.
And I started having a lot of fun, I found my passion, it was around 2016 that I decided to pick back up the QuickCoin concept and finish what I started creating a PayPal for digital currency, but now with a bigger vision-a global digital bank that could move at the speed of light and interact with any financial system.
And Metal was born! That’s my crypto founder story in a nutshell lol.
This video filmed in 2016 talks about Facebook and other large companies creating their own blockchains, and the emergence of the digital dollar… Now we’re living it!
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Many people will want to buy you a drink now to listen to these stories. Can you tell us what your role is at Metal/Proton and what the project is about in a few simple sentences?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: I’m the CEO and Co-founder at Metal and Co-founder, Director at Proton blockchain. Metal is a digital banking and finance platform of the future, with two products Metal Pay and Metal X.
Metal Pay is the global digital banking and payments platform, sort of like a bank of the future. It’s the only banking platform in the world I’m aware of that directly integrates cryptocurrency.
Metal X is our global cryptocurrency exchange platform that runs on Proton rails, so all fiat interactions are done over the Proton network.
I think recently Cash App may have joined us in this category as they JUST added bank accounts, but only offer Bitcoin, whereas Metal Pay has 30 cryptocurrencies including stablecoins.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: What does that mean concretely. Do people have bank accounts in BTC for example?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: So you get your checking account that is linked to your name with FDIC insurance. You can direct deposit your paycheck into it, pay bills, receive payments, and earn rewards.
In addition, you have access to 30 cryptocurrencies to buy/sell and send/receive as well as main — net interactions. Sort of like Coinbase but better.
And now you never have to worry about your bank causing problems because you purchased some BTC or crypto, we are the banking platform and we welcome crypto!
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: And what is Proton Blockchain?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: There are a lot of sad stories of Wells Fargo and other banks closing accounts because of interactions with Coinbase etc., we don’t have these issues as we provide the bank account directly.
It’s a standalone blockchain, the consensus layer is dPoS and the most interesting thing about it is that it interacts directly with the card and bank payments settlement layer.
What this means is now the blockchain can directly interact with Visa/Mastercard and your bank.
For example I could request some USD from your visa debit card from my TrustWallet or Trezor.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Can you seamlessly draw from your crypto assets with your credit/debit card and pay with that in the real world?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Correct. Now all wallets can interact with fiat regardless of whether they have a connection to the processor. It’s incredible and makes a huge change in the way blockchain works today. Moving it from a walled garden to a completely interoperable ecosystem.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: What do the fees look like by the way?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: The cool part about fees is that any processor can join the Proton network as it’s completely open and permissionless. So this creates a highly competitive landscape for fiat/crypto conversion, thereby effectively creating lower fees through the network effect. Versus a small handful of exchangers that live in their domain.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Some companies are also trying to do cashback on crypto cards but I’m not sure if they can sustain that or if it’s just a temporary marketing gimmick to attract new users at first.
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: I think in many cases the cashback around cryptocurrency is usually leveraging existing rewards programs and then converting those merchant credit dollars to BTC, etc.
The difference with MTL is the concept that merchants can now issue their rewards directly as digital assets over MTL smart contracts on the Proton chain and know that their rewards are directly reaching their users.
Versus converting USD to BTC which seems like a gimmick to me as you pointed out. We allow the merchant to directly interact with the consumer in the form of digital assets and not the other way around.
Q — Telegram user Sunney: Is there any reason behind the name Metal, and what sparked the idea behind creating Proton Chain while you have your own mobile payment app Metal Pay?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Haha yes, this is an interesting story… I was never good at names and Carter Laren, the founder of the incubator Metal went through in 2016 called Gateway, helped us come up with the name.
It was the process of building the digital bank with the integrated blockchain layer that we discovered it. Glenn and I were staying up late one night and he says to me “we should really build a ‘bankchain’, replicate all of this old school payment messaging on a secure chain, and eliminate this wonky system where your username is your password” and it was like a spark.
Why have we been sending payment data over insecure rails and always getting the same problems with constant credit card and identity breaches? I wouldn’t give you the password to my email address if you wanted to send me an email, so why are we handling payment data in this manner?
We immediately started working on the solution and initially called it “XID”. Throughout 2019, we drew up different diagrams and schematics and superimposed them over the existing fiat payment processing systems we had been working with, the main issue was what we call ‘payment hardness’ which is essentially the level to which a transaction is reversible or not.
The next problem was the settlement time, as well as PCI compliance, identity, and transmitting the accompanying data while staying compliant in multiple jurisdictions. Later in 2019, I started talking with Fred K, the CEO of the Lynx team and I fell in love with their product.
I immediately recognized that Lynx had the design and engineering chops to build not only a beautiful Metal/Apple-like product but also completely understood the concept of usability and beautiful UI and design.
Fred and his team had built a fork of EOS that had very elegant governance and built on the dPoS consensus method, but most interestingly had taken a strong approach to make a beautiful workable web3 experience that stretched far beyond anything I had ever seen.
I called Fred up one night and asked him plainly “What would you think about a merge with Metal and Lynx?” He didn’t even hesitate “Yes, let’s do it, right away.”
Our long term vision: Metal is the next Stripe.
Only this time, payments are not insecure and they are built on Proton and blockchain rails, everything completely interoperable, not just blockchain interoperability, but full global banking and financial interoperability. Making a payment or checking out online is as simple as typing your @name and confirming on your phone.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Do you have numbers to share regarding users, volume processed through your system, number of merchants or companies onboarded?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Yes, we are currently over a quarter million users registered on the platform and have processed mid -double-digit millions at this point while in beta. When we expand to the world this year, we expect to break our first million.
Product
Q — Twitter user Sushil Kumar, Proton (XPR) I’d @sushil: How do MTL & XPR contribute to the current financial system?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We are breaking down the walled gardens of fiat. No longer are the days you will see wallets pointing you to Metal Pay or Coinbase to buy crypto and come back to the wallet. Now all fiat payment requests happen on-chain.
Proton fundamentally rethinks the way we handle existing payment flows, and some of the biggest innovations are the ability to check out online without typing your credit card, shipping address, and other private payment and personal credentials. Now you just type your @name and hit checkout, confirm in your Proton client such as Metal Pay 3.0.
Also, all payment apps can communicate with each other over the Proton chain as well. So, for example, when PayPal integrates Proton blockchain I could send you a payment from inside Metal Pay by typing @alex. I will see your blue checkmark and that you are a PayPal user. We’re no longer trapped by our banks or payment providers. Payments become universal and interoperable.
Q — Telegram user Bitcoin: What’s the relation between Proton Chain & Metal Pay Projects?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Metal is the core developer of Proton blockchain along with other inner steering committee members, currently the majority of the development is focused around Metal and Cryptolions, think of us like the Consensus behind Proton.
Proton interacts with fiat by replicating existing card and bank payment commands on — chain as a protocol, Metal Pay is like Mastercard or Visa, one of the first processors on the network.
Q — Twitter user Luca: With the release of Metal Pay 3.0 can you tell us more in detail the four components that will be capable of interacting with the Proton blockchain using the authentication and push signing technology?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Awesome question! You can think of Metal Pay (3.0) kind of like Mastercard or Visa in the sense that we’re one of the first processors on the Proton network, but certainly not the last.
Signing requests can be initiated by any individual or entity but will only appear if they are on the whitelist with your payment provider (whether this is Metal Pay, PayPal, Cash App, etc). Proton Foundation maintains a master whitelist similar to Mastercard MCC Merchant Category Codes. These are what we call “blue checkmark verified merchants” and recommended to all financial service providers on the Proton network to show as valid requests. The request itself specifies the types of currencies that are accepted. There are several ways a signing request can happen:
- Scanning a code, whether this is on an advertisement, on your television or computer screen, think of it sort of like a buy it now or open-source Apple Pay.
- Deep linking technology whereby you tap a payment request in your browser or another app, and your Proton client (in this case Metal Pay 3.0) will simply pop up and prompt you to sign the transaction.
- Push request: This happens on-chain and will pop up in your Proton client (Metal Pay 3.0 or otherwise) and allow you to authorize it.
All of this is relatively seamless and replicates the Apple Pay experience except you’re using Proton rails and payments are being settled in crypto.
Q — Telegram user Alice: I read in your whitepaper about the 3 principal issues, that are the reason why existent blockchains are not made for dApps: SPEED, COST, USABILITY. How does Proton solve these 3 major problems being a blockchain made for the development of dApps?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Speed: we have one of the highest transaction throughput rates at 4–5k TPS and there are no fees to transact.
Cost: no fees to transact, in fact you could be rewarded on Metal Pay to transact, so negative fees. We exposed this as well as one of the first spot exchanges with Metal X to offer negative fees on maker trades over a certain volume.
Usability: we are providing a better developer interaction than traditional blockchains with the full suite of products from Metal Pay (digital banking layer), Metal X (exchanging and trading layer), MTL (rewards layer based around PoPP), and our most powerful resource Proton (XPR) network, built in — house in an Apple-style, with similar phenomenal UI/UX of all the products.
We make building on blockchain as simple as Stripe, and the best part is that it interfaces with legacy finance, it fundamentally not only changes the way we work with crypto but with banking and e-commerce.
Q — Telegram user Isam Mery: Can you explain what the MTL marketplace consists of, what it focuses on, and how to trade?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Metal Pay marketplace allows access to 30 cryptocurrencies and counting. The marketplace inside Metal Pay is meant to evolve beyond a simple trading and wallet platform, but creating the “verb” action of cryptocurrencies in which you will be able to interact with these blockchains with their intended functions.
Security
Q — Telegram user siska Jessica: Does your team have a plan for possible cyber attacks on the Protonchain network? How does a hack attack affect the network? Will content sharing be harmed?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Yes, we are always prepared for such attacks but welcome the new and exciting experiences that crypto continues to teach us. In the event of a blockchain attack some but not all of the potential limiters are restricting deposits and withdrawals and rolling back on Metal Pay off-chain functionality.
Re: Content sharing, I’m assuming you are referring to Chirp, our concerns around this are low as we continue to foster the growth of the project in an open-source manner and welcome the world’s best security researchers to help us harden the system over time through the FOSS community and our public Git.
Q — Telegram user Yusuf: What makes current vulnerabilities in mobile payment apps be eliminated at Metal pay and from your Proton Chain, how safe are you from 51% attacks?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Proton chain is currently undergoing third party audits and is built on existing EOSIO tech that has been vetted and hardened by the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities
In regards to Metal Pay and the mobile payments experience, we implement some of the latest in cutting edge anti-fraud detection as a partner with Nudata Mastercard, Emailage, and other great anti-fraud tools.
We also have built many custom internal tools. As I said earlier — it’s really a mindset and thinking like the hacker in order to thwart the best hackers.
Q — Telegram user Paul: Are there any security improvements planned for Metal: multisig capability, biometric data support (fingerprint and face recognition, voice recognition, and voice phrases)?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We currently support multi-sig on our deposit wallets in Metal Pay and Metal X. However, with the crypto card in Metal Pay 3.0, we will begin to offer multisig functionality whereby you have full control over your Proton private keys with multiple authorized signers as an option.
Something we are working on is biometric authentication for larger value transactions as well as an enhanced optional security precaution for power users and high net worth individuals or corporates using Metal Pay.
This is especially important as we expand the Metal Pay product to offer enterprise accounts.
Competitive Advantage
Q — Telegram user Groot: How different is Metal Pay from Paypal, Venmo, AliPay, and WeChat Pay.
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We are built on blockchain rails. These other systems are kind of like the old-guard semi-neo-banks that are really dinosaurs in their own right. They usually only allow you to interact with their semi-closed API that requires approval whereas Proton is completely permissionless and opt-in and touches traditional fiat rails. The only one I would really draw a comparison to is Square Cash App because they’ve integrated Bitcoin and have similar features to Metal Pay.
However, the difference with Metal Pay is that we’re leaner, we’ve built our product from the ground up using crypto and we are set to rapidly expand and offer banking services in all the places these competitors cannot, thanks to Proton.
Q — Telegram user Red: What makes Metal unique and advantageous compared to others in the crypto industry like Dashpay, Coti pay, etc?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We are a regulated MSB (Money Service Business) and have gone further than any of these other payment platforms, none of which have FDIC insured deposit checking accounts, Visa/Mastercard partnership (Metal has it), nor their own exchanges to provide liquidity.
I think a fairer comparison is some of the big boys:
Facebook — hasn’t launched a single thing yet.
Square — best competition but only has one coin, Bitcoin, and only recently added real bank accounts.
Kakao — doesn’t support cryptocurrency in-app.
What most of the ‘big boys’ have on us are pre-existing users and mega funding. Metal is quickly growing to rival them in every way, and now with the help of Proton we’re launching the world’s first universal payment network for fiat and digital assets, and we don’t have to “build it and they will come”. We already built it with Metal Pay and Metal X.
Q — Telegram user Soka: What makes Protonchain a better blockchain than current blockchains like Ethereum, Binance, NEO, etc?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Proton beats many of the incumbents in so many ways, none of these other platforms have the core developer support of exchange, digital bank, and in general — profitable business…
I can only think of one which is Binance, however, we are different in that we are a digital banking platform in addition to the exchange and Proton blockchain is really the next generation in payments with transaction speeds far beyond other chains, free payments, human-readable addresses and soon to have Stripe level docs and consumer/merchant banking that is directly integrated.
Q — Telegram user zafer metin: What are the advantages of METAL assets being FDIC insured? What risks does it protect users from? In which regions and settlements do FDIC insurance serve?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Benefits of FDIC insurance are really great. In the collapse of our banking partner (unlikely but still good to have protection) this gives each account holder up to $250,000 of insurance.
FDIC aka Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (US-based banks only) is the hallmark of a trustworthy bank and should be expected on any real deposit account, Metal Pay implements this seamlessly with cryptocurrency and banking all in one app.
Previously most of these accounts were what you call “omnibus custodial accounts” and only allow you to wire in funds similar to Crypto.com.
Unlike some of these competitors Metal Pay offers you real bank accounts, not only with insurance but the ability to do all normal banking interactions including paying bills.
Personally I love earning PoPP with MTL and then paying my Apple Credit Card bill and getting MTL and Apple Cash… However, pretty soon there will be a Metal card with greater rewards, so you can count on me switching to that, along with all of our community members and mass-market consumers.
Tech
Q — Telegram user Groot: Can you explain Proof of Processed Payment (PoPP) consensus mechanism in brief and state why PoPP is important for your project?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: PoPP is not consensus, rather it is minting and distribution. With MTL PoPP, we have the capability to fairly and equitably distribute new assets to users of any level. MTL can be earned through PoPP on the Metal Pay platform and will soon dictate the issuance of other rewards as we open source this with MTL smart contract on Proton blockchain.
Q — Twitter user Sushil Kumar, Proton (XPR) I’d @sushil: How is the proton chain different from other blockchains?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: There are no gas or transaction fees, and all addresses are human-readable such as @alexander or @marshall.
MTL specifically addresses the distribution mechanism that can be achieved through regular human-based tasks and does not require computation from a machine ie PoW mining, The rewards are minted around a mechanism we call PoPP which started as a centralized/decentralized hybrid and is now expanding with Proton blockchain for any issuer to distribute assets in a meaningful way around MTL smart contract on Proton.
Q — Alexandre R from GAINS: Isn’t this an issue? How do you deal with people trying to spam the network? Don’t get me wrong, no fees is great 😁
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Block producers are rewarded for processing blocks, in the event of spam payments they are simply rejected similar to dust payments on Bitcoin blockchain. In addition, verified @user names are prioritized over non — verified @names, thus further preventing spam and issues with clogging the network.
We addressed some of these issues that we discovered with EOS which was the lack of a governing body, so we formed the Proton Foundation which is comprised of Metal, Lynx, EOSUSA, Greymass, EOSCafe, and CryptoLions organizations, who make core decisions around the network that are then voted on by the public with Proton. We’ve found this is a more democratic process and the verified blue checkmark concept is required by all inner steering committee members, thus invalidating any attempts at creating multiple Block Producers that are effectively the same party masquerading as many.
Most blockchain networks are permissionless so they can’t “stop” illegal transactions per se or they lose their permissionless nature.
However, on Proton we have the concept of @names and embedded identity, also the ability to embed metadata such as other blockchain networks transaction IDs, as well as payment flags for fraud and risk that can be automated between institutions.
Stolen funds sent from one exchange to another? No problem — automate account freezing with a fraud payment flag on Proton. Proton may be one of the first blockchains to address these major issues and is one of the reasons we’re quickly outpacing Facebook Libra.
Q — Telegram user Lushen: Why did you choose to build Proton with EOS and not ETH? Did this choice give you any benefit in terms of performance?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Believe it or not, XID actually started with ETH, but the economic model is unfortunately unsustainable with the way ETH is built when we discovered the concepts introduced by EOS we were instantly hooked and Fred and the Lynx team had solved all of the pre-existing problems with EOS such as the Rex, flawed governance, etc.
Performance is infinitely faster, whereby on a clone of ETH we were very severely limited by transaction fees limiting mainstream functionality, as well as being able to scale between 4k — 5k TPS.
Token
Q — Telegram user Maximar: Regarding XPR token how do you manage the moderate annual inflation?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Inflation is split through several mechanisms.
- Proton Foundations operational spending.
- Network grants to partners (Visa, PayPal, etc for embedding @names these are network costs not Moneygram/Ripple scenarios, partners are paid to pilot Proton integrations to cover network fees for @names and RAM costs).
- Staking. Staking is effectively 5% of the staked amount per year broken down BPs (50% of the annual staking rewards), 30% to network stakers, and 20% to Proton Steering committee staked coins.
Under no circumstance is the network to exceed 1b per supply increase per year. However, this doesn’t mean it must be 1b maximum. It’s a hard cap limit of the system.
Q — Telegram user Gue Siapa: Why do you need the $MTL token? What are the use cases for Metal Pay?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Metal Pay is a global open source banking platform that interacts with multiple blockchains, primarily MTL and XPR Proton rails but also Bitcoin and others.
MTL inside the Metal ecosystem could be equated to BNB, it allows you premium pricing on SaaS, complete reduction of fees, additional features, and more specifically on-chain it acts as an oracle of sorts for reward distribution (more to come here).
Q — Telegram user Ejike james: What is your token economic model and how will its architecture ensure the scarcity of the token and raise its value?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We are about to publish an updated whitepaper that outlines how MTL is used to mint other rewards over PoPP via a smart contract to the network through paying fees in MTL, similar to Facebook targeting. You have the capability to target specific behaviors and users. However, the MTL rewards layer is decentralized unlike Facebook.
We believe the real value is not specifically only driven by scarcity but network adoption and usage. Both MTL and XPR are limited in production but provide two very interesting parts which are the rewards layer and the payment request and identity layer. In the case of MTL, scarcity is driven by consumers, and in the case of XPR, scarcity is driven by businesses.
Q — Telegram user Cryptonaut: What are the requirements for becoming a validator and a node issuer at Proton Chain?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: BP (Business Partner) code of conduct: We will run our BP operation with the following rules and goals in mind:
- Transactions between end-users should always go through.
- Free Account. End users should always be able to create at least one free account.
- Low cost of usage for basic apps. Basic apps that request tokens and payout tokens should be very inexpensive to run.
- No congestion. No app, however useful, should cause overall congestion. Sufficient resources for basic apps and basic transactions should always be there. Block Producers will attempt to prevent congestion.
- No censorship based on content. Block Producers will not censor types of apps (adult, gambling) on the chain level. However, wallets may do so.
- Protect Digital Property Right. Block Producers may take action against a dApp if it is operating maliciously, for example, transferring users’ digital assets without their informed consent.
- Low cost of entry. Basic apps should be allowed on mainnet for free with limited resources. It should be possible for a college or high school student with some knowledge of coding to push an app to Proton’s mainnet.
- Block Producers will be technically competent with low latency, few missed blocks, and active engagement and communication to improve the technical operation of Proton.
Here’s the full article.
Q — Telegram user Elisa: What are the core features that create the value of MTL? Can you share some highlights from them?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton:
Metal Pay: Global open-source digital banking platform.
MTL: Decentralized network that rewards users for their interaction between parties and merchants, the identity reputation and rewards layer.
XPR: Global decentralized payments network and protocol for fiat and digital asset interactions, the email of finance.
Business Development
Q — Telegram user Zombie Alex: What are the major milestones you have achieved so far?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: So far we have launched four products, made two acquisitions, acquired Lynx team in LA, grown the team to over 35 people, expanded our operations into EU with the launch of Metal Financial Services OU, and Metal X.
With Metal Pay platform soon to have banking support for the EU, we also recently raised a funding round and launched Proton blockchain and also established some great partnerships we will announce this year.
Q — Twitter user 𝕣𝕖𝕕𝕝𝕦𝕓𝕦𝕘𝕦𝕚𝕟: Are you fully compliant? Do you think MetalPay is ready to face the challenge of government regulation?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: As a company, Metal is fully compliant and is a regulated registered Money Service Business (MSB) in the United States, a direct Visa, and Mastercard partner as well as partnered with Evolve Bank and Trust.
We have a fully operationalized BSA manual and compliance program with a Compliance Director, five full time in house compliance analysts, two full — time in — house counsel. We are also fully registered in the EU as a financial institution.
We’ve created strong anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and OFAC screening.
In addition, I recently authored a Congressional Bill around cryptocurrency with the help of Representative Gosar (AZ) called The Cryptocurrency Act 2020, which is probably the most founder-friendly, concise and progressive policy in Washington currently
Funny story behind this, some groups Blockchain Association and Coincenter attempted to say my bill was “dead on arrival” when in fact it achieved more interest in Washington than anything they had done in four years with millions of dollars in donations and multiple staff members.
The Metal team pulled it off, just myself and Erik going to Washington together. We caught the attention of congressmen/women and regulators and helped spur the excitement behind the digital dollar in congress (of course no lobbyists like it when two people make a whole team look bad when they have teams of lawyers and millions haha).
Q — Telegram user Crpto Devil: What are your plans for global expansion? And Do you have any plans to attract non-crypto investors to MTL and how?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We are expanding to all 50 states this year as we begin our nationwide money transmission licensing, a very onerous and long process that we are beginning now to fill in the 12 states we don’t currently have.
Global expansion is also happening this year with the introduction of Metal Pay 3.0 read more here.
With our expansion this year into the EU, we will also be providing EU banking support for all member countries minus any OFAC sanctioned countries. We are moving hyper-fast and exploring other banking relations in Korea, Canada, Mexico, Africa, Latam, and more… The beauty is that with the Proton network, we are expanding faster than ever with other massive payment and identity partners.
Many people in the US’ first experience with crypto is MTL because it’s so easy to use and earn. We are attracting more attention through social media AMAs like we have here in GAINS chat, but also more traditional media from TV to YouTube and working with influencers.
Q — Telegram user Lushen: What is your strategy in terms of marketing?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We want to focus on major key payment and identity partners, and to grow the developer ecosystem very similar to Stripe.
Q — Telegram user Lovely Dream: What have been the biggest achievements so far and what do you hope to achieve in 2020?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: We have some incredible achievements from becoming a regulated digital banking platform, proving our thesis of PoPP and MTL from 2017 when many projects died, launching our global cryptocurrency exchange, launching Proton on main — net from day one, surviving the bear winter and emerging 100x bigger than before with a growing team, acquisitions under our belt and all underhanded attempts from competition to stop us (or clone us).
Metal has built what the largest competitors failed to do with an exponentially larger team and budget: create a real digital banking platform with cryptocurrency integrated — this is really exciting and sheds light on the potential of the Metal team, where we are about to go.
In 2020, we plan to have finished all fifty states’ money transmission licensing for the US, in addition beginning the process of acquiring our banking charter.
Q — Telegram user Gurdeep: What are your team’s strategies and visions to onboard more users for the Metal Pay platform?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: Our focus is on the long term and building out a global payments network that can be used anywhere, by anyone, through introducing larger partners and creating an industry-wide initiative to connect all financial apps we are creating a massive web from existing decentralized crypto wallets, to fiat wallets, banking platforms, and e-commerce.
Q — Telegram user Lunm (investing microcap projects): A blockchain that interacts with FIAT is interesting. What could be the first currencies? dollar, euro, yen?
A — Marshall from Metal/Proton: First currencies will be wrapped USD, BTC, and MTL will migrate to Proton becoming “XMT” and we will be rapidly adding more!!
That concludes the most massive AMA I’ve ever conducted in my entire life. I hope this answers most if not all of your MTL, Metal and Proton questions!!!!
Big thanks again GAINS community and @Firunner for helping us organize this, it’s been a BLAST!!! 🤘🔥🌚🚀
The 10 hour AMA lol, incredible!!— Marshall
Marshall, thanks a lot for coming in today! It was a pleasure to learn more about Metal, a digital banking, and finance platform of the future, and Proton Blockchain, the underlying dPoS blockchain that makes things happen.
The work you’ve done is very impressive: you’re fully compliant in the US and the EU and you’re building a kind of super network to connect fiat and crypto for everyone. It will be seamless with human-readable addresses. You’ve already onboarded 250k+ users!I’m very excited to see where this is going to go. Please keep us updated! Where can we go to follow you? — Alexandre Raffin
Follow me and Metal Pay for the latest updates. Also follow our new global cryptocurrency exchange Metal X
Cheers again, everyone 🍻🍺🥂 — Marshall
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