Why We’re Betting Big on Token.com and Sunsetting Monolith
(For updates follow me on X: @melgelderman or for media inquiries email ana.solana@token.com)
Introduction
Today marks the end of an era as we announce the closure of Monolith. While this chapter comes to an end, our journey is far from over.
I’d like to take this opportunity to share our full story and what we’ve learned from these experiences. This story begins with Monolith; one of the earliest DeFi lifestyle products packed with pioneering concepts that are only now being widely recognized, and continues with token.com; the next-gen consumer crypto app that will forever change the game for the retail crypto consumer.
Origins of the Monolith product vision
Monolith (originally TokenCard) was announced at the earliest developmental stage of the Ethereum Ecosystem back in November 2016. It was the 9th mainline project to raise funds on Ethereum through an ERC20 token.
The product consisted of three major elements. Each with their own critical backstory:
- Visa Card: After falling deeply in love with Bitcoin in the summer of 2013, I quit university (Aerospace Engineering at TUDelft) and closed all my bank accounts. I was determined to travel the world exclusively on a Bitcoin wallet. Years of jumping through hoops and hurdles to make this fantasy a reality, ultimately lead to the inevitable conclusion that a Visa/Mastercard crypto service would make living on crypto a seamless reality, for those like me.
- Smart Contract Wallet: During my Bitcoin-fuelled travels I became fast friends with Leo Treasure, one of Bitcoin’s all-time most iconic characters. In 2014, his Bitcoin wallet was tragically hacked, losing 750 Bitcoin overnight. He desperately called on the industry to make multi-sig wallets standard. His warnings would, years later, compel me to spec Monolith as the first consumer contract wallet.
- Ethereum Ecosystem: Finally, in 2015, a time when Bitcoin was in the midst of a deep civil war over scaling, Ethereum was truly united around the grand innovation of a world computer. The need to scale was obvious, and the EVM provided a pivotal playground for the world’s digital assets. Ethereum was the future, it was the End-Game. Early projects like Augur, The DAO, MakerDAO, and Digix pointed to a vibrant, space-age financial system. After meeting Vitalik himself it was settled: With Monolith we would build for the glory of the nascent Ethereum Ecosystem.
In late 2016 the above product vision for Monolith finally resonated deeply with the early Ethereum community leading to us getting instantly funded on May 2nd 2017. Indeed, I feel very grateful to count many of our industry’s most notable stars (founders, VCs and KOLs) as some of our earliest supporters and users. If you are reading this: you are real OG.
The challenges: Death by a 1000 cuts.
After the token sale the complex reality of executing on this pioneering product slowly set in. Delays and the emotional pressure of a live trading token in the market gradually eroded sentiment, despite steady progress IRL. Monolith went through execution hell. Some of my darkest days would follow.
We faced significant challenges during development, here are some of our top learning moments. May they be spared on the reader:
- Faith in the regulator — Early on we decided to set up operations in the UK, believing we could gain the trust of the regulator. Little did we know we literally walked into the lion’s den. We believed the FCA would be pro-innovation. They were not: they ended up declining >90% of crypto companies in 2021 causing a mass exodus from the UK.
Lesson learned: Pick your battles, incorporate your operation where the regulator is friendliest. - Supplier challenges — Established Visa program suppliers were reluctant to work with crypto, leaving us with limited, lower-quality options. During our build 50% of the suppliers willing to work with crypto collapsed, and it took Visa over a year to feel comfortable working with the first non-custodial offering. We walked so others could run.
Lesson learned: Suppliers can quickly become your primary bottleneck. It’s crucial to choose them wisely and reduce your dependencies where possible. - Leadership challenges — Being a young founder at the head of a significant operation came with real management challenges. There is a fine line between listening to your team vs letting them overstep.
Lesson learned: A weak leadership structure leads to slow and incoherent decision making. Your structure defines your success. - Anti-Marketing Culture: For reasons still unclear to me, we adopted an attitude that seemed “too cool” for traditional marketing; surely a great product alone is enough to win. This led to fatefully missed opportunities and ultimately resulted in many customers flocking to inferior, centralized solutions over our non-custodial solution.
Lesson learned: Casual users will only ever download the app they have heard about. If they ain’t heard about you, you may as well not exist… Make marketing sexy again. - Token launch — Our token was made transferable from the first day of the TGE (a common practice by projects of that era) this caused the community to obsess over the token price movements, whilst in reality there were still years of building ahead. What followed was a slow descent into hell as excitement inevitably drained.
Lesson learned: Your token should start trading when you, your product and your marketing team are all ready. Not from the day you complete your token sale. Channel people’s excitement at the right moment. - Lacking infrastructure — In the early Ethereum days developer tooling was non-existent. This meant that our pioneering on-chain aspirations were a complex and slow build. We had a head start, but soon lost it to our centralized competitors.
Lesson learned: If we had remained flexible, rather than true to the Whitepaper spec we could have saved months of elaborate engineering. - Gas Prices — We had built our entire product on the assumption of cheap gas costs. In 2019, for the first time, gas prices soared. Suddenly new user (smart contract) wallets started costing us over $100 each. Killing our growth exactly when people wanted our product most.
Lesson learned: Be resilient in your ability to onboard during a bull market. If that means adapting your product, do it.
Market Timing and the FTX Impact: By early 2021, we began to conclude that our non-custodial product wasn’t what the mainstream market wanted, as the evidence showed users choosing simpler centralized solutions with better marketing over our non-custodial technology. This led us to start building our next vision for success. Fatefully, over a year later the collapse of FTX in November 2022 dramatically shifted the market landscape. In an instant, non-custodial solutions became highly valued, with the market unanimously recognizing them as the superior option.
Monolith had been advocating for this approach long before it became popular, but we were ahead of our time. Post FTX, the emergence of the ‘degen’ culture and the subsequent market shift underscored that sometimes being too early can feel like being wrong.
Overall takeaway: You can be so early that it takes years — and sometimes a major disaster — for the market to catch up to you. Don’t give up.
It would not be a stretch to say Monolith died by a thousand cuts. Monolith will forever be my greatest passion. I loved our community, I loved our product, I loved our brand, I loved how early we were and I loved the dedicated team we built.
The successes: Monoliths Achievements
After two years of heavy development Monolith went live in early 2019 in over 30 countries. Monolith enabled 35,000 of the earliest Etherians to live out their on-chain fantasies, long before even “degen” culture had taken hold. With a total of $113,654,969.87 spent in the real world, we are immensely grateful to our passionate users and proud to say that the Monolith smart contract wallet has maintained a flawless security record.
Monolith had many notable firsts:
- First Consumer Contract wallet.
- First Ethereum-centric Visa debit card.
- One of the first crypto cards approved by Visa. The very first non-custodial. Paving the way for current products.
- One of the first major Bankless sponsors.
- First Contract wallet with swap integration and proprietary fiat onramp.
- Top 10 Ethereum Gas spender in 2019 and 2020.
- Created one of the first Uniswap Liquidity Pools.
- Hosted the first DeFi conference ever [mDeFi], shoutout to @tokenbrice,
- Part of the first cohort of UK FCA Sandbox to collaborate with crypto companies.
- One of the best brands the industry had ever seen. Our brand served as direct inspiration for many major projects in our industry today.
We kept Monolith operational for our loyal users however, the rapidly increasing operational & compliance complexities of running a card program are now forcing this service closure. Given how dated the underlying architecture has become as well as our focus on developing a more long-term impactful product, led to the question: “Can we continue delivering on our original vision for Monolith with high impact, or do we need to consider a more powerful idea designed to be the crypto utility product of tomorrow?”.
Token.com — Building a Product Vision for 1 Billion Users
Our company has always been focused on realizing the transformative potential of tokens for society. In 2016, Monolith was our answer to this vision. However, nearly a decade later, the market and its challenges have evolved significantly.
We believe the first billion-user consumer crypto app could emerge by 2030. The question is: what will it look like?
The idea for Token.com came during the fervor of DeFi Summer in 2020. The sheer volume of interesting tokens was overwhelming, and I longed for a content-based app to navigate this burgeoning landscape. This led to the concept of Token.com — a video-first social network for investing in the tokenized world.
This product is not just a dream — it’s a reality. Over the past two years, we have developed a viral product, successfully launching a beta in Brazil. We are now in the final stages of deploying this global app. We are excited to bring this product to the world, ushering in a new wave of crypto adoption that not only thrills consumers but also empowers their financial journey
The $TKN Token
With the restructured operation around Token.com, we are designing a new token model that integrates neatly within the Token.com ecosystem. Therefore Monolith $TKN will be exchangeable for the new freshly minted Token.com token at a favourable rate.
Please stand by for updates and the Token.com whitepaper that I am writing with the team. Follow me and Token.com on X @MelGelderman @Tokencom_
Tokens are destined to change the world. This is a global transition measured in decades, not years. But the wider crypto industry seems blind and oblivious of where things will end up.
Over the next 24 months Token.com will demonstrate to the entire world that we have one of the grandest visions in the space today. Showing a viable path towards a tokenized world. We are here to change the game and we want you on board.
Thank you for reading this post, thank you for your support and LFG!
Onward and upward,
~ Mel Gelderman, CEO Token.com
Please follow me for updates on X @MelGelderman
