One of the questions we frequently get asked is how did Skyteller come to be? And what led Galactic down the path to build a personal off-ramp for everyone? The story involves banks, compliance, disappointment, excitement and other things that are normal in fintech startups.
Harper recently shared the story on Twitter and Farcaster and we decided to roll the threads together. 🧵
tl;dr: So many twists and turns, but we are launching a personal offramp at http://skyteller.xyz - check it out!
🚀 Back in early 2022, we got really into off-ramps in the crypto world. We knew that without a good off-ramp, the ecosystem limits who can participate. If we want web3 to be what we all know it can be, participants need to be able to buy groceries, pay for childcare, and (most importantly) buy tacos! 🌮
We wanted to change that!💥 So we set out to build a really neat solution for off-ramps that would work for everyone, but particularly people working in crypto. That solution: debit cards!
🤝 We locked in some fantastic partnerships and nailed down the legal perspective on our product. Bank approval came quickly, and we got card network approval too. We spent the summer building out the product and getting it ready for launch.
💼 By the time the program was approved, we knew we had something truly awesome on our hands. We started finalizing details with our partners for KYC, swap, insurance, and more. Everything was looking good until FTX happened…
🔍 We double-checked with our partner, and they said they were bullish on our use case. We hired a fantastic Chief Compliance Officer to make sure we were doing everything by the book.
🗓️ We set our sights on a November 2022 launch date, but our partner and partner bank said they needed to wait until Q1 2023 for an audit by the card network. So, we waited.
📞 We spoke with the card network, and they said everything was fine. But when our partner and partner bank came back, they presented us with some unexpected challenges.
🔍 We didn’t give up though. We found another bank that was excited to work with us. Unfortunately, they hit the pause button on all programs until they could figure out what was going on in crypto.
💡 That’s when we realized that a self-custodial debit card program wasn’t feasible at the moment. But we didn’t want to stop building off-ramps, so we put our thinking caps on.
💰 We came up with a neat product that lets anyone get an Ethereum address that connects to their bank account. It allows you to seamlessly off-ramp anything from ETH into fiat, like magic.
🙌 There are so many cool use cases for this product. You can add your off-ramp address as your NFT marketplace royalty address and have your royalties deposited directly into your bank account.
💰 You can set up a 0xsplit or payment splitter and have this ETH account be one of the addresses for pushing 40% of your crypto earnings to your fiat account for taxes.
🍕 You can even add it to your ENS address (harper.skyteller.eth) and have people pay you directly in USD to cover fiat expenses (like pizza!). Your parents could set it up too, and you could send them crypto to appear in their bank account like magic.
📝 You can sign up for the waitlist at http://skyteller.xyz. Join us on this crazy journey!