Founder: Will Reeves and Matt Luongo
Established date: 2014; Company Latest: 2019
Headquarters: remote
Amount of Bitcoin held by the Treasury: “Fold’s history since its founding”
Number of employees: twenty two
Website: Fold App
Public or private? private
Will Reeves wants to turn Fold into a Bitcoin bank.
This may seem counterintuitive to Bitcoin enthusiasts who believe that Bitcoin was created to replace banks, but Foldingis an app that allows bitcoin enthusiasts to earn bitcoin rewards for everyday purchases and convert DCA into bitcoin, putting things on a more down-to-earth level.
He believes Fold will be the ultimate app that connects Bitcoin not only to the traditional world of banking, but also to the new world of Bitcoin L2.
“Think of us as building a bridge to Bitcoin for people who are used to transacting with traditional banks,” Reeves told Bitcoin Magazine.
“We’re going to make the case for why you should ditch your old bank and use Fold because we value and respect bitcoin and we bring features that don’t exist anywhere else,” he added.
“We are also in the fold. lightning To enable faster, cheaper payments for users who use Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash. liquid There’s a fold and there’s a roll-up. Bit VM, arc(too.)”
Before you start thinking that this is all too good to be true and that it’s impossible for one app to do all of this, it’s important to keep in mind that Reeves and his team have spent the last decade looking at what bitcoin users want and need most, and realigning Fold’s mission accordingly.
Fold Phase
Founded in 2014, Fold started out as a platform to help users sell unwanted gift cards for Bitcoin. Shortly after, the company also allowed users to buy gift cards with Bitcoin, allowing Fold users to make everyday purchases at stores like Starbucks and certain supermarkets.
For the company’s second phase, Reeves and co-founder Matt Luongo pivoted and allowed users to purchase gift cards with fiat currency and earn Bitcoin rewards in the process.
“We evolved because we realized that a big problem was that not enough people had bitcoin, and not enough good ways to get it,” Reeves explains. “That’s why we focused on rewards: giving anyone a way to passively earn bitcoin without a lot of risk and without a lot of education.”
Reeves believes that with this third-generation Fold, Fold users are ready to incorporate bitcoin into their financial lives more broadly.
“We want to make bitcoin central to people’s lives,” he said. “The product is growing, and not only can you earn bitcoin rewards, you can also use your bitcoin as savings and buy and spend it regularly.”
Making Fold the Bitcoin app everyone can use
Fold has been a bitcoin-only company since its inception (though the platform also supports the US dollar, which some Fold users consider just an “altcoin,” Reeves joked).
Reeves seems to appreciate the challenge of finding a balance that meets the needs of dedicated bitcoin users and newcomers who want to get the most out of their bitcoin.
“One of the things I’ve tried to do is bring together the best possible people to build a product that really understands the needs of bitcoin users, but at the same time make sure that the features we create are usable by someone who’s maybe new to bitcoin,” Reeves said.
“Every time we release something, there is a litmus test: the feature has to be so valuable to a local Bitcoin maximalist on Twitter that they would want to recommend it to their mom, sister, brother or friend,” he added.
Reeves drew parallels between using Fold and using an app like Duolingo, which caters to language learners at different levels.
“Duolingo is an app that caters to both advanced language speakers who want to take it to the next level, and people who are looking for their first vocabulary in another language,” Reeves explains, “which was a big focus for our design team.”
Wenfold International?
Currently, Fold only serves U.S. residents, and before interviewing Reeves for this article, we asked X’s followers what they wanted to know, and the most common response was, “When are you going international?” (The “h” in “when” is intentionally omitted for those unfamiliar with Bitcoin slang.)
Reeves said Fold plans to launch more products internationally, but those products may not be released under the Fold brand name.
“We’re currently building the infrastructure to expand into Canada, the UK and other countries, starting with rewards products,” Reeves explained.
“When we think about other countries and their unique dynamics, Fold may not have the local market expertise, so we’ve built a platform that allows other companies to leverage our entire infrastructure,” he added.
“Are you trying to build a bitcoin bank? Do you want to build storage, transactions, a bank account with a debit card, etc.? You can leverage that technology and launch something internationally. That way, you can scale more quickly with local expertise.”
Reeves shared how Fold’s intellectual property is currently functioning in the Bitcoin nation of El Salvador. Office availableWe then go into more detail about the value of Fold’s intellectual property (IP).
Fold IP
Fold developed early on in the bitcoin space and therefore has a very valuable tech stack right now, and Reeves said this is true not just for Fold but for many bitcoin startups.
“We’re still early in this space, so basically every bitcoin startup is building a huge amount of IP that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Reeves said.
But he stressed that what Fold has built is very unique.
“Nobody’s built anything like Fold is offering a bitcoin wallet that connects to a Visa-linked, FDIC-insured bank account and can convert it back to bitcoin,” he explained.
He also believes that as larger institutions enter the space, they will leverage what Fold has built to develop their own bitcoin products and features.
“A lot of the value that bitcoin companies are building today may look like consumer products today, but they’re actually the complete infrastructure that will power and underpin the products that larger companies will have when they want to get into bitcoin,” Reeves said.
“All of us, the founders of Bitcoin, looked at the flip side of what we’d done and realized, ‘This is going to be extremely valuable to a lot of people and a lot of partners,'” he added.
The Future of the Fold
The Fold will soon be rolling out new features for its app, and while we can’t reveal just what those features are just yet (we’ll let you know soon), Reeves can tell you what the Fold is trying to encourage its users to do.
“Stop the banks that keep cutting off payments to buy bitcoin. Stop the banks that block loans because you work for a bitcoin company.”
“There is no reason why bitcoin users should have to use fiat banks that cancel their bitcoin purchases by calling them risky payments,” Reeves added.
“Fold is creating a home that gives privileges to people who hold bitcoin, which doesn’t really exist today.”
And in addition to giving bitcoin enthusiasts a better experience with traditional banking and a great place to stack their sats, Fold also looks to the future, including Lightning, Liquid and other Bitcoin L2s.
“The vision really comes to fruition when we say, ‘There is no door that Bitcoin can’t go through. There are no rails that Bitcoin can’t go through,'” Reeves explained. “Fold has to make it so that we can hold Bitcoin and send value seamlessly through traditional fiat rails. We can send value through Lightning. We can send value through Liquid, we can send value through all of the other extension definitions of the Bitcoin layer that can provide new value to Bitcoin users.”
Download the Fold app here.
