Introducing the Cryptobank

The cryptoeconomy is the future of banking. But traditional banks aren’t embracing it. In fact, their historical model makes it impossible for them to act as the gateway to the decentralized financial services that matter most to their customers. A new breed of banks is emerging to fill that void — I call them “Cryptobanks” — here’s how they came about, and where they are headed:

Modern banking: anatomy of a failure

Modern banks came out of a need born in the booming principalities of medieval Italy. Banks were able to offer services that were desperately needed: the ability to secure savings, to facilitate trade, to insure investments, and to finance the emergence of a flourishing merchant class. And from the start, bankruptcy was part of the model. In fact, the term bank and bankruptcy both originate from Italian, and both appear in the 12th Century.

But enough with the history lesson: the reason why the modern banking as it emerged then is still alive today is that it supports the present-day economy by offering financing (credit) and underwriting (insurance) services for businesses. Banks have now grown increasingly complex, intermediated, and their main vulnerability has remained consistent across centuries: they are highly centralized organizations, which means they all have a “single point of failure”. Banks handle everything: from data to transiting information to the customer-facing apps that render their services accessible. It makes them very hard to replace. But it also makes downtime all the more likely to happen, hindering businesses that rely on them in an overly bankarized world. Over time, banks have become better at guarding their Achille’s heel but have never been fully able to cure it. The systemic banking crisis of ’08 is a painful reminder and still echoes today.

The rise of the Cryptobank

Cryptobanks build on the shortcomings of traditional banks. They improve existing services, and open access to new ones to better cater companies needs. And their blockchain-based architecture corrects their traditional counterparts’ major flaw: they are decentralized.

Why do companies need decentralized financial services? For starters, they eliminate modern banking’s “single point of failure” and, in so doing, increase reliability in the services they provide — i.e. say goodbye to downtime on your banking app. Second, they don’t hold funds — they merely enable users to access them in a simple, convenient way. Third, they’re transparent. Not just because they don’t charge any hidden fees, but because the protocols they use are open source and can be audited externally by anyone, anywhere — you can also kiss goodbye to crises like subprime where toxicity lies hidden away from regulators deep in pages of legalese and untraceable intermediaries. Lastly, they are censorship-resistant: transactions can’t be canceled, modified, re-routed, or in any way altered.

Isn’t a Cryptobank just going to help tech-minded people? The answer is unequivocally “no”. What makes neobanks — think Revolut and N26 — an attractive alternative to traditional banks today is their glimmering UX/UI layer that makes financial services easy and accessible. They don’t reinvent the model, but they do improve the user experience and reduce friction. Cryptobanks, on the other hand, are the new innovative class of a century-long history of banking evolution. They replicate the strongest attributes of past generations, and build resistance to vulnerabilities. A user-friendly interface allowing all users — especially non-technical ones — from all companies to access the financial services they need is vital to the Cryptobank’s mission: to democratize access to the cryptoeconomy.

So, what services does the cryptoeconomy offer that aren’t accessible via traditional banking? It’s not all new. Cryptobanks offer services that are very similar to traditional banking, but applied to crypto. Storing funds. Earning interest. Managing outgoing payments to staff and partners. Wiring money abroad. Exchanging currency, whether crypto to crypto or crypto to fiat ($,€, £, etc). After all, the beating heart of a business sounds the same regardless of what is being pumped through it. But, because they are disintermediated, Cryptobanks add value where traditional banking could not: they generate less costs, they are accessible anytime, anywhere, and they deliver services like lending almost instantly.

Also, they open up a world of possibilities. Crypto is the dawn of a new era and, like previous eras, the new ground it will cover is unpredictable. Who would have thought that the credit card would have become the default method of payment before it was introduced? Who could have imagined that this same credit card would even be used online and even potentially replaced by smartphones? And, going further in a different space: who would have predicted that 2 billion people would log in each day to a website called thefacebook.com to spend time with their friends? By opening access to the budding cryptoeconomy, Cryptobank’s make it anyone’s guess what the services they offer will look like in a decade. The brightest minds are already hard at work to reinvent the financial system, but it’s foundations are strong, because they are based on a handful of principles that are easy-to-understand, and — just as importantly — easy-to-verify.

Introducing Multis, the Cryptobank for companies

We’re building Multis, the first Cryptobank for companies and entrepreneurs. Today, we allow companies to:

• Buy crypto and store funds securely
• Manage multi-access to funds and set spending limits for team
• Earn interest on idle treasury
• Run payroll and recurring payments in any cryptocurrency they want
• Get paid, pay providers and reward their community in crypto
• Exchange tokens natively, from ETH to DAI

And our vision reaches much further. Beyond what we’ve called our “Minimum Viable Cryptobank” and is what we’re currently building, we’ve laid out a few principles to guide us into the future of banking:

We believe companies should be empowered through finance. We want to remove unnecessary intermediaries in legacy corporate financial services. We want to provide a simpler way for organizations to access the resources and services they need to thrive. We want to enable access to new, yet-to-be-imagined, decentralized financial services so that they can go even further.

We believe in an open world governed by a new set of rules. We will build on existing, open source code to offer an easy to understand and easy to audit set of services. We will charge for our service based on the value we create for our customers, and following pricing that is clear for them from Day 1. We will enable access to funds, but never hold them on your behalf.

In short, we believe in building the gateway for companies to access the emerging cryptoeconomy. We know it’s still early days for crypto, but we believe there is tremendous value for companies and that owning crypto will become obvious. And when it does, we will be ready for it.

Join the movement

We launched our service this summer. If you want to be the first on board for the next generation of corporate banking services, sign up via our site or send us an email at hello@multis.co.

We’re also hiring in multiple positions (growth/design/engineering): if you’re keen to join a growing team of happy and passionate crypto enthusiasts and contribute to our mission to democratize access to cryptos, send us an email at join@multis.co.

Last but not least, we need all the feedback we can get: a clap, comment, or DM is more than welcome! Especially if you disagree ;)