Founder: Will Reeves and Matt Luongo
Establishment date: year 2014; The company’s most recent version: 2019
Headquarters location: remote
Amount of Bitcoin held in Treasury: “What we have accumulated since the founding of Fold”
Number of Employees: 22
Website: https://foldapp.com/
Public or private? private
Will Reeves wants Fold to become a Bitcoin bank.
This may sound counterintuitive to hardcore Bitcoin users who believe Bitcoin was created to replace banks, but it allows Bitcoin enthusiasts to not only earn Bitcoin rewards for everyday purchases. Reeves, co-founder and CEO of Fold, an app that lets you earn DCA for Bitcoin, sees the situation. More practical.
He believes Fold will be the best app to connect Bitcoin not only to the old world of traditional banking, but also to the new world of Bitcoin L2.
“You can think about creating a bridge to Bitcoin for people who are used to doing their banking through traditional banks,” Reeves told Bitcoin Magazine.
“We’ll explain why you should ditch your traditional bank and come into the fold. Because we will respect your Bitcoin, give it privileges and unlock features that don’t exist anywhere else,” he added.
“Fold for Lightning also has room to facilitate faster, cheaper payments for users who use Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash. We also think there is room for Liquid on Fold. And then there’s Rollup, BitVM, Ark.”
Before you start thinking this is too good to be true (it’s impossible for one app to do all of this), Reeves and his team have spent the last decade focusing on what Bitcoin users want and need most, and recalibrating Fold’s mission accordingly. do.
Stages of Fold
Founded in 2014, Fold started out as a platform to help users sell unwanted Bitcoin gift cards. Soon after, the company began allowing users to purchase gift cards with Bitcoin. This has helped Fold users make their daily purchases at stores such as Starbucks and certain supermarkets.
In the company’s second phase, Reeves and his co-founder Matt Luongo flipped the script and allowed users to purchase gift cards with fiat currency and earn Bitcoin rewards in the process.
“We evolved because we knew the bigger problem was that not enough people had Bitcoin and there weren’t enough good ways to get it,” Reeves explained. “That’s why we focused on rewards: to give everyone a way to passively earn Bitcoin without requiring a lot of training and without a lot of risk.”
In Fold’s third iteration, Reeves believes Fold users are ready to integrate Bitcoin more broadly into their financial lives.
“We hope to bring Bitcoin to the center of people’s lives,” he said. “The product has grown and it is important not only to receive Bitcoin rewards, but also to use Bitcoin as savings and to make regular purchases and spend.”
Making Fold the Bitcoin app for everyone
Fold has been a Bitcoin-only company since its founding. (Well, the platform also supports the U.S. dollar, which some Fold users consider just another “altcoin,” Reeves joked.)
Reeves seems to appreciate the challenge of finding a balance between meeting the needs of hardcore Bitcoin users who want to get the most out of Bitcoin and those who are new to Bitcoin.
“One of the things I’ve tried to do is bring together the best people possible to create a product that is very friendly to the needs of Bitcoin users, while also making the features we produce available to people who are just starting to use Bitcoin. “For the first time.” Reeves said.
“Every time we launch a product, we do a litmus test. “This feature should be infinitely valuable to the local Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter, who could then recommend it to their mom, sister, brother or friend,” he added.
Reeves drew parallels between using Fold and apps like Duolingo that serve language learners at different levels.
“Duolingo is an app that caters to expert-level language users looking to take things to the next level, as well as people looking to pick up their first few vocabulary words in another language,” Reeves explained. “This is something our design team leaned heavily on.”
Why Fold International?
Currently, Fold only serves U.S. residents, and when I asked X’s followers what they would like to ask Reeves before interviewing him for this piece, I was asked, “Wen International?” answer. (For those unfamiliar with Bitcoin slang, the “h” in “when” is intentionally missing.)
Reeves shared that Fold is on the verge of launching more products internationally, but that the products may not appear under the Fold brand.
“We have now built Fold’s infrastructure to expand into Canada, the UK, and beyond, and we will be leading the rewards product first,” Reeves explained.
“When you start thinking about other countries and their unique dynamics, sometimes Fold doesn’t have the expertise in those local markets. “So we built a platform for others to leverage our entire infrastructure,” he added.
“So you want to create a Bitcoin bank? Want to store, transact, connect, and more to your bank account with a debit card? You can leverage that technology to launch something internationally. This will allow us to scale much faster with local expertise.”
Reeves shared that this is how Fold’s intellectual property currently works in El Salvador, a Bitcoin country where the company has offices, before providing further insight into the value of Fold’s intellectual property (IP).
Fold’s IP
Because Fold was initially developed in the Bitcoin space, it now has a technology stack with great value. Reeves shared that this is not only true for Fold, but also for many Bitcoin startups.
“Because we’re in the early stages, essentially every Bitcoin startup is building a ton of IP that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Reeves said.
But he emphasized that the features Fold has built are very unique.
“No one has built a Bitcoin wallet that can communicate with an FDIC-insured bank account linked to Visa that can convert Fold back to Bitcoin,” he explained.
He also believes that as larger institutions enter the space, they will leverage what Fold has built to create their own Bitcoin products and features.
“A lot of the value that Bitcoin companies are building right now may look like consumer products today, but they are actually full-on infrastructure plays that will jump into and underpin big-logo products with Bitcoin,” Reeves said.
“As Bitcoin founders, we all look at what we’ve done and think, ‘This is going to be incredibly valuable to a lot of people and a lot of partners,’” he added.
The future of Fold
Fold will be releasing new features for the app soon. We can’t reveal what those features are yet (you’ll hear about them soon), but according to Reeves, we can share what Fold is trying to incentivize you with.
“Ditch the banks that keep stopping payments to buy Bitcoin. Ditch the banks that block your loans because you work for a Bitcoin company.”
Reeves added, “There is no reason why Bitcoin users should have fiat banks canceling Bitcoin purchases as risk payments.”
“Fold is creating a privileged home for those who hold Bitcoin. It doesn’t really exist today.”
And in addition to giving Bitcoin enthusiasts a better traditional banking experience and a great place to build up their sats, Fold is also looking to the future of Bitcoin L2 like Lightning, Liquid, and more.
“When we say, ‘There is no door through which Bitcoin cannot be used,’ the vision really comes together. ‘There is no rail that cannot be used,’ Reeves explained. “Fold should provide ‘I hold Bitcoin and I can transfer value seamlessly over traditional fiat rails.’ You can send value via Lightning. I can send value across Liquid and any broad definition of other Bitcoin layers that can provide new value to Bitcoin users.’”
Download the Fold app here.
Source: Bitcoin Magazine