Within the last 24 hours, MyCrypto and its founder, Taylor Monahan (@tayvano_), have received questions, concerns, and excitement about the brand launch. Our hope is that the entire community remains engaged and holds the utmost trust in our platform. While we’re a “new” brand, our team of product developers, blockchain experts and customer support staff are hard at work making sure MyCrypto is a great new experience and way to manage your Ether (and possibly more blockchains in the near future!).
In our pursuit of transparency and providing information to you, we wanted to publish a thorough FAQ that will help to better understand the recent shifts. We will continue to update the community as needed.
Q: Who is part of the MyCrypto team?
A: The current team at MyCrypto is made up of 20 people within product development and management, blockchain experts, and an education & support team.
Taylor Monahan (@tayvano_) is the founder and CEO of MyCrypto. In her recent business split with Kosala (@kvhnuke_) and MyEtherWallet, the MyEtherWallet team members voluntarily decided to join the MyCrypto team, in addition to a few new team members. This includes Kevin Monahan (@thekevinmonahan), Taylor’s husband and original member of the MyEtherWallet team. To see a full list of MyCrypto team members, you can visit the website.
Q: Why did the switch happen? Why did Taylor make the decision to launch MyCrypto?
A: Taylor (@tayvano_) and Kosala (@kvhnuke_) launched MyEtherWallet nearly three years ago. While it was a great partnership for a majority of that time, ultimately this partnership ended by mutual agreement. We cannot disclose the terms of the mutual agreement, but both founders were aware of this split and the subsequent transition. In her new pursuit, Taylor has started MyCrypto to continue providing the best and most secure blockchain services for the community.
This year, Taylor has established a specific set of goals for MyCrypto:
- Establish a team that is well equipped to make choices that are the best for Ethereum, the community, and the larger blockchain space, as well as to operate as a fully transparent, compliant, and legitimate organization capable of balancing all the interests involved.
- Create the best product to empower people to interact with the blockchain.
- Find the balance between safety, control, ease-of-use, privacy, and decentralization.
- Build MyCrypto with the proper business and legal structuring mindset from day one to avoid these types of circumstances in the future (we already hired a Compliance Officer and proper lawyer!).
- Ensure that MyCrypto users understand the risks of the blockchain and can make informed choices between our product and alternatives.
- Engage with our supporters in the best ways possible — listening to feedback, adapting our product and providing support, regardless of their technical abilities or communication skills.
- Remain true to MyCrypto’s open-source, privacy-minded, transparency-focused and client-side roots.
Q: What happened with MyEtherWallet’s Twitter handle?
A: The team working at MyCrypto is the same team that has managed MyEtherWallet’s Twitter handle for the past three years. The content that has been shared on @MyEtherWallet since 2015 is the thinking of the team that now makes up MyCrypto.
The Twitter followership plays an important role as a security beacon and relayer of important information during community-emergency-type events. With this in mind, the operators of the account made the decision to keep the Twitter followership under the control of those who have the track record of executing its duties faithfully and in line with the needs of the community.
We wish marketing and security were not so intertwined, and MyCrypto in no way intends to steal the fruits of MyEtherWallet’s promotional efforts. We encourage any followers to follow both companies as this transition manifests (you can still follow MyEtherWallet’s handle at @myetherwallet). We hope the community appreciates the difficulty in balancing these two important interests.
We have worked with Twitter to follow all procedures and policies, including becoming a verified user. We apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this has caused the community. To clarify further, the verification check-mark did not migrate with the username. As soon as the Twitter username was changed, verification was lost. We worked directly with Twitter to get @MyCrypto verified shortly thereafter. Had we not fully complied with Twitter’s verification process to establish that we are a legitimate, bonafide account, we would not have received the verification check-mark.
Q: What is MyCrypto doing to ensure the security of my Ether?
Ensuring the security of everyone’s funds is the number one principle at MyCrypto. It’s important to note that due to the way MyCrypto is developed, private keys are NEVER stored, as MyCrypto is only an interface to your crypto assets that are stored on the blockchain. While we are not a custodian of your funds, we recognize our responsibility to develop and maintain critical software and infrastructure that is relied on.
Over the last year, the team working at MyCrypto has:
- Rebuilt the product you know and love from the ground up with a focus on software correctness and maintainability. Additionally, we have worked with Cure53, (an independent security auditing firm) to audit our new codebase and are happy to report that all reported vulnerabilities have been patched or otherwise addressed. A public beta will be announced in the near future, and we’re excited to hear your feedback.
- Developed Electron-based desktop applications. We have long-since taken steps with EAL and EtherscamDB to combat phishers and our desktop applications are the next logical step. You can be confident that you are not at risk of a compromised javascript payload by running the MyCrypto desktop application outside the context of their regular browser.
- Developed typ3: a type-safe alternative to web3 for contract interaction. By integrating the type-safe functionalities that typ3 provides, we can provide better guarantees about the correctness of our software at runtime.
- Developed Drawbridge: a framework for release verification and management for webpack compiled (or otherwise minified) SPAs. We have also worked with Cure53 to identify and vet the principles behind Drawbridge, and are happy to report positive results. Drawbridge will be used to power the new codebase for MyCrypto, and we are eager to work with the wider developer community to introduce this new framework for hosting SPAs.
- Created Sentry: a health checker for our internal infrastructure that helps us verify releases and ensure the integrity of our backend infrastructure. While Sentry isn’t yet ready for an open-source release, we’re working on it, and are excited to share it as soon as it is!
Our new codebase, tooling, and the existing production site are open-source. We look forward to working with the Ethereum and wider blockchain development communities to further improve our wallet services.
Q: Will MyEtherWallet still exist?
A: MyCrypto, and its staff, are no longer associated with MyEtherWallet. Therefore, we cannot comment on the current standing or future endeavors of their brand.
Q: Should I start accessing my wallet with MyCrypto instead of MyEtherWallet??
A: This will be a personal choice for everyone. We will not urge you to switch. We do encourage you to follow MyCrypto and keep up to date with our product offerings and development. Our hope is that our team will continue to add value to the space. The significance of our product — since day one — has been that YOU control your keys and therefore your funds. There is no need to “switch” or send all your funds from one website to the other as both are simply interfaces that interact directly with the blockchain.
Q: I have more questions, who can I talk to?
A: Our team is here to help! Please contact support@mycrypto.com or press@mycrypto.com and our team will get back to you as soon as possible.
We realize there is a lot of information being circulated and our team is working to answer individual requests and concerns within a reasonable amount of time. We sincerely appreciate your patience and we commit to keeping the community up to date through all MyCrypto channels.
Thank you,
The MyCrypto Team
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