Paying for Cryptonite will now land you $150 worth of MetaCert Tokens 🎁
The crypto world is going through a tough time right now. And MetaCert is not immune. We are now forced to charge for Cryptonite so we can keep the service live for the people who have come to rely on the green shield to say safe from phishing scams.
Cryptonite now costs $8 per month, payable up front annually for $96. As a special bonus, the first 2,000 people to pay will be given $150 worth of MetaCert Tokens to help make the transition to a paid service easier to digest and reward early supporters.
As a Cryptonite Pro subscriber you can expect to see major updates in Q1 2019 including:
- Green shield for financial, storage and other mainstream sites beyond crypto. For example, apple.com and associated sub-domains will display a green shield so you can avoid non-crypto phishing scams.
- Protection against crypto mining.
- Protection against crypto wallet addresses that are used in phishing scams — this will require a major update but now that Cryptonite is a paid service we intend to make significant improvements so you continue to see huge value in the service.
How Cryptonite is VERY different to MetaMask and other tools that have anti-phishing security
Uninstalling Cryptonite in favor of another anti-phishing solution is a very bad idea if you’re a crypto trader or investor, or you work for a crypto company. I’ll explain why.
A false sense of security leads to bigger problems down the road
Bad actors create new phishing scams every few minutes — every day — of every week. It’s impossible for any security company to detect and protect you from every newly created phishing scam. IMPOSSIBLE. So… victims lose the entire contents of their wallet — or their personal credentials are stolen — or both.
Victims then report their loses so anti-phishing solutions can be updated to protect everyone else. The time it takes for each company to update their solutions varies. I’d argue MetaCert is by far the best and fastest because it’s the only thing we are focused on — other companies are focused on other things.
Over half of all phishing sites use a padlock — so you can’t rely on that for identifying legit sites. 🚫
Cryptonite is for traders and investors 🔥🔒🎣🔨
Cryptonite is designed with crypto traders and investors in mind. You know it’s safe to make a trade, or sign into a crypto website when you see the green shield from MetaCert. As you probably know by now, the green shield indicates that you are in fact on the real site or social media account, and not on a brand new phishing site that was created 5 minutes ago. Even the MetaMask team submit their URLs to be verified by MetaCert — as they know that their users rely on Cryptonite to stay safe from new scams. Separately, we at MetaCert love what the MetaMask team are doing.
Not one Cryptonite user has fallen for a phishing scam since it was released in December 2017.
How we’re doing so far
Of the original 76k active Chrome users, and at the time of updating this post, about 16k people have uninstalled Cryptonite since we moved to a paid model. We are now laser focused on making our power users happier — with new product updates (see below for more insight).
We will be happy if 2,000 people pay the annual subscription, so please help us get there by showing your support through the paid service. 🙏 Some people told us that they paid for the service just to show thanks for our contribution to the crypto ecosystem — for eradicating phishing on Slack in 2017 and more recently on Telegram by protecting over 1 million crypto people with our free security bot for communities.
How to pay
Below are instructions that must be followed in order to be able to pay for Cryptonite. I have also included instructions on how to use Cryptonite on multiple computers using the same account.
If you REALLY want to pay in crypto
A lot of people in our community have expressed an interest in being able to pay in the form fo cryptocurrency. We heard you! If you really want to pay in crypto, instead of using Google Payments, we’re developing a solution now. To enquire about using crypto please send a private message to Billy on Telegram — https://t.me/RobotComms ← Remeber, Billy will NEVER DM you unless you message him first. You can also connect with Billy on Slack — the link can be found at the bottom of metacertprotocol.com
You can use Cryptonite on multiple computers
To use Cryptonite on multiple computers, follow the steps above — making sure you sign into the same account that you used to pay for Cryptonite. Make sure you turn on sync or Chrome won’t know that you’ve already paid for Cryptonite.
After you have signed into the same Google Account and turned on sync, install Cryptonite. Don’t install Cryptonite and then sign into Google — that might not work.
Our journey into crypto
In June 2017 MetaCert got a call for help from a number of crypto companies, including Matt McGivern from SingularDTV.
Crypto enthusiasts were losing money through Slack scams every 5 minutes. At the time, we were the only company with an anti-phishing security solution for Slack. Meanwhile we were about to execute a go-to-market strategy to see what existing enterprise customers really thought of our service. Our customers included IBM, Sage, SAP, NTT Security, Blackhawk Network, the British Government, AppDirect, IBM, and many more. We didn’t know if we had a true product/market fit.
As the CEO I had a choice to make — iterate the service for existing customers and learn how much they would be willing to pay, or iterate the service to address the immediate need of everyday people who were losing their entire life’s savings right in front of my eyes, which is what we ultimately went with. While serving the immediate needs of the community was an easy choice it was also a risky one for a startup, and we spent the following 3 months iterating our service because the bad actors were attacking people in ways we couldn’t have predicted.
A small handful of crypto companies moved to alternative platforms, But almost all of them stayed on Slack and installed our security solution.
MetaCert completely eradicated phishing on Slack in 2017 — that’s why you don’t read about it anymore. 🎁
Soon after, most crypto companies decided they didn’t need our Slack security anymore — so we didn’t get a chance to generate enough revenue to justify the huge amount of time and effort that went into the solution. By not executing the strategy for Enterprise customers and not generating enough revenue from the Crypto community, we didn’t have the “traction” required to raise a series A round.
We predicted phishing attacks would migrate to other platforms way before they did, so we built solutions for crypto exchanges and wallets as well as Telegram and Twitter, and of course, our desktop browser that many people have come to rely on — Cryptonite. The concept for Cryptonite was new, but simple — provide a new green shield of trust so you know when you are really on a crypto site and not a new, undetected phishing site.
Today, we protect more people in crypto than all other security companies combined. That’s over 1 million people in Crypto, and it’s all for FREE!
Where the idea for a MetaCert Token came from
So many crypto founders and other stakeholders over the course of our journey kept advising us to decentralize everything we do, and launch our own Token. It took months for us to get our heads around the concept as we were new to crypto. But we eventually decided that to scale our verification system, we would need to launch a Token to reward submitters and validators. You can read more more at metacertprotocol.com
At the peak of the market we had $30M in allocation requests on a $100M network valuation — with no white paper and no discount or bonus offered. This might sound strange, but remember, almost everyone who asked for allocations was using at least one of our tools to address a problem that they faced personally. Phishing is the single biggest problem in the crypto world and MetaCert is an order of magnitude better than anyone else at protecting people from this problem.
Runway getting shorter
Before we could launch our Token sale, the market tumbled. During that time, many people thought MetaCert was a multi million dollar company. Some thought we were over-subscribed and closed our funding and some thought we decided not to raise at all.
Two months ago we decided to return to our core products and services, placing the Token Distribution Event and launch of our Blockchain solution on hold until the end of Q2 2019. We continue to sell Tokens today to community members who value the entire project — but the number of Tokens hasn’t hit our “soft cap” of $1.5M.
2019 is looking hot
Our new email security service is one of the best projects I’ve ever been involved with — it’s reinventing email security. Seeing is believe https://metacert.com/email and we have 20+ integrations lined up for our API service with exchanges and wallets as well as non-crypto companies.
Our recent survey provided insight that serious traders and investors rely most on Cryptonite, while less than 5% of respondents identified themselves as someone who works for a crypto company. This staggeringly low figure could account for the high volume of data breaches amongst exchanges, wallets and ICOs. 😬
While Cryptonite protects you from phishing scams, that’s not the reason for installing the service for most users. The vast majority of people are safe because they refuse to log into crypto sites that haven’t been verified — the green shield is where the magic is.
Cryptonite is the only software application in the world that tells you when you are viewing a verified official page, so you can be sure it’s not one of the many phishing scam impersonating it.
Zero Victims
Cryptonite is now a year old, and I’m extremely proud to say that of the 80,000 active users, not a single person has fallen for a phishing scam when using this security service. As you know, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is rife with cybersecurity problems, but what you probably don’t know, is that 90% of all data breaches begin with a phishing attack.
Below are some questions that have already been asked by members of our community. I thought I’d share them along with our answers to make it easier to understand what we are doing and why.
👉 If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them here, or email me personally at paul@metacert.com
👉 You can also engage with our team and other community members on Telegram at t.me/metacert
