My 30th birthday was in a week. For many young adults, this would be a time of mixed feelings. The excitement of a celebration with friends and family, but perhaps also the concerns of getting ‘old’ and maybe even a quarter life crisis.
In my case, I didn’t have time to think about such luxuries thanks to an unexpected birthday present: thyroid cancer.
I haven’t shared this story publicly before, but I wanted to write down what happened and how I reacted. I can’t promise to write the definitive guide for dealing with all medical conditions while running a company…
Bitwala is integrating a custody wallet alongside our non-custody wallet solution. We wanted to take the time to explain what is changing, why and how it will affect our customers.
What is changing
- All users will get a custody wallet for bitcoin and ethereum as part of their Bitwala account.
- Users will be able to use the custody wallets to trade, deposit and send, and use the Bitcoin Interest Account.
- Trading will be cheaper and faster from the custody wallet as there is no on-chain transaction.
- In the future, new functionality such as spending your bitcoin directly from your card…
TL;DR Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is the recreation of financial products (e.g. derivatives) and services (e.g. lending). DeFi will innovate far faster than traditional finance, but will be unable to break out of its niche without the trappings of modern FinTech.
What has FinTech achieved in the last decade?
I am extremely grateful for FinTech. Aside from providing me employment for the last years, the use of banking and financial services are far more enjoyable now than they were a decade ago. When I first moved to Berlin, getting a bank account was a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork and bad German. …
For most of 2015 I had three full-time jobs.
Back then I suffered chronically from ‘saying yes to everything’ syndrome and had gotten myself into a position where my workload was simply unrealistic for a human being.
Job 1: CTO & Co-Founder of Bitwala
I was responsible for the tech and product of a very early Bitwala as well as all the demands of a 3 person co-founder team.
We were still entirely bootstrapped back then and we were not paying ourselves a cent.
Job 2: Founder, CEO, CTO & just about everything else of MeteorFactory
To solve the problem of having zero income from Bitwala, I decided to start freelancing. The idea was to hedge my bets: I…
In a fast paced startup, you expect your job to change. In fact, some say that if you don’t give away your Legos and it isn’t radically different every 6 months, you’re doing something wrong.
In the half-decade I’ve been working with Bitwala, we’ve scaled from 3 guys and a dog to 70 people (and multiple dogs!). I’ve witnessed a dramatic shift in the work that we do and the way that we do it.
👨👨👨➕🐶 → 👨👩✖️7️0️ ➕🐶🐕🐩
It is, however, the role of Chief Technology Officer that changes the most dramatically.
My life as CTO: 3 Phases
Phase 1: The Jack of all trades
“What a surprise, your launch is delayed?”
…
I was recently told by an engineer we were trying to recruit that he had another job offer from a company he also liked. He was making up his mind and asked me “Why Bitwala?”
I started typing away a reply and here’s roughly how it went:
1. People are happy working here
We recently rolled out the first edition of our anonymous employee satisfaction survey.
What an incredible journey.
Running a startup is not easy and few of them actually make it. Bitwala’s journey is far from over, but today we can take a breath and celebrate an incredible milestone: our company’s Series A.
Bitwala has always been the bridge
When I first walked into a Berlin co-working space in 2013, Bitcoin was €60 and no-one had heard of it. In fact, we were the first German language Bitcoin blog.
6 years later, things couldn’t be more different as the blockchain economy and ecosystem have flourished and developed beyond recognition.
Bitwala started off as a humble shopping site that let you…
The Bitwala Christmas party was a shock for me. Our team had grown to almost 40 people and we had just launched our new product after a tough year spent offline. It was shocking because the mass of people in front of me was such a stark contrast to how Bitwala started: three guys and a dog.
In a startup you’re supposed to focus on the future — the vision that drives the company forward. …
You’re in the middle of a task and realise that you need to send an email. You open Gmail.
20 minutes later.. what was I doing again?
It’s clear to most of us that being productive means checking email less frequently. This is fine until the task you’re working on requires either
- Sending an email
- Finding something in an email.
Doing so will mean going to gmail.com and exposing yourself to an inbox full of urgent, but not important micro tasks which are often too tantalising to resist.
I suffer from this problem on a daily basis, or at least…
In December 2018 Bitwala launched the world’s first crypto bank account; a fully licensed German bank account with a Bitcoin wallet and trading directly integrated. In the future, there’s going to be a ton of bank accounts with this kind of functionality and we are immensely proud to say that we are the first.
It was put quite well by Jörg, my co-founder:
As you can imagine, combining old money and new money into one account is no easy work, so who actually built this?
Who we are
Most of the people who work at Bitwala agree that the best thing about…
Ben Jones
Co-Founder & CEO/CTO @Bitwala
