Company Name: Feddy
Founder: Obi Nwosu, Justin Moon, Eric Sirion
Established date: June 2022
Headquarters: Fully remote
Amount of Bitcoin held by the Treasury: N/A
Number of employees: 27 full-time employees
Website: https://www.fedi.xyz/
Public or private? Private
Just a few years ago, Obi Nwosu was running Coinfloor, a long-running and successful bitcoin exchange in the UK. But he found himself frustrated – he believed a free technology like Bitcoin could do more to help people around the world.
So he and his two partners Feddy,recently”Community Super AppThe service, which Nwosu calls “digital money,” offers an easy and private way to not only manage money, but also to communicate digitally and meet the various needs of communities around the world.
“We built Fedi because it solved a problem that we were seeing,” Nwosu told Bitcoin Magazine.
“The question is how to empower disempowered communities around the world and give the millions of people who use (Bitcoin) exchanges a path to move from third-party to self-custody,” he added.
“We realized that the middle ground was the community. If we could find a way to empower the community – to provide services that are equal to, or in some ways better than, the centralized services that the vast majority of people still use, and replace them with a party that individuals trust more than a third party, then that would be the way to go. That was the initial idea, and the rest is history.”
To paraphrase Nwosu a bit, the rest is history in the making.
After more than two years of developing the Feddi Super app, the company Live broadcast It’s scheduled to be released on August 6, 2024. And what the app will offer in its first version will likely go beyond what Nwosu himself envisioned when he embarked on the project.
What is Fedi?
According to Nwosu, Fedi has two main components:
“The app is also called ‘Fedi’ and it has a network of local experts who can support users,” he explained. “We call them ‘Fedi Orders.'”
The app leverages what Nwosu calls “freedom technology,” such as Bitcoin. lightning and NostreAlso, Fedmint ProtocolIt allows users to share storage of bitcoin, leverage the Lightning Network, and issue ecash, a digital token pegged to the value of bitcoin, fiat currency, or other assets that is used to ensure privacy in transactions.
Apart from that, it also allows users to send messages privately and has other functions, features and even other apps within the app, hence it is called a “super app.”
“You don’t need to install multiple apps to get things done,” Nwosu explains. “With[Fedi]you have one app to do all the different things you need to do, all in one place.”
Imagine WhatsApp, Twitter, and Venmo all rolled into one app. Fedi offers different, more free-form, tech-oriented versions of messaging, social media, and payment apps.
But because some of these technologies are new and difficult to use (especially Bitcoin, Lightning and ecashmint), Nwosu said Fedi is offering community support through the Fedi Order, which is made up of “Fedi Knights” who act as a “decentralized Genius Bar.”
“If you have an iPhone and you’re having problems, you can go to an Apple store, go to the Genius Bar and someone knowledgeable will help you solve the problem,” he said.
“We wanted to recreate that feeling, and that’s what Fedyodor is doing. They’re providing on-the-ground community support, and that’s what you need if you want to take Bitcoin beyond experts and enthusiasts,” Nwosu added.
This kind of support is especially helpful for parents in the Fedi community.
Parents and the Federal Custody Model
To achieve Nwosu’s original plan for Fedi – moving bitcoin out of exchanges and into the self-custody of its owners – the company is leveraging a federated custody model, a multi-sig setup in which different “custodians” hold the keys to bitcoin funds.
Community members elect people to be Guardians, and these Guardians work together to run the Fedi software, distributing trust among themselves. They are also responsible for storing the community’s bitcoins and issuing ecash. Together, Guardians form a federation to create a governance model with no single point of failure.
“(Each parent) can be trusted individually, otherwise they wouldn’t be in that role,” Nwosu said.
“The fact that you need two out of three, or three out of five, adds a lot of credibility. We see this done many times by organizations, businesses, governments, the military and households,” he added.
“Adding additional Guardians gives us an additional level of redundancy and resiliency.”
Guardians also make decisions for the community about how to use the various modules, or “mods,” that Fedi provides.
“Modules are a way to upgrade Fedi with (more) capabilities,” Nwosu said.
By the way, every Fedimint comes with three modules: the Bitcoin module, which provides federated access to Bitcoin, the Lightning module, which gives the community access to the Lightning Network, and the mint module, which gives users the ability to issue ecash.
Nwosu said there are additional modules, one of which is a stability pool module, which Fedi said “Stable balanceFor information about assets, see .
The stable balance feature allows the community to peg their Bitcoin to the value of fiat currency or another asset, a feature that is especially important for communities that don’t want to endure Bitcoin’s volatility.
“As long as there is a price interaction between Bitcoin and the asset, you can set up a stability pool that will bring price stability to the asset,” Nwosu explained.
“It could be US dollars, it could be your local currency, it could be gold, it could be Tesla shares. Different people will use it differently,” he added.
Open sourcing Fedi
One might think that a company that has taken the time to build a super app would want to keep that code secret.
But not Feddy.
The company already plans to open source its code so that it can be publicly audited. One of the reasons for the company doing this is to gain more trust from the communities it serves, but there are two other reasons for taking this step.
The first is about the company’s philosophy.
“First of all, philosophically, our number one goal is to build tools that combine the best of the free technologies that are out there,” Nwosu explained.
“We believe that for a lot of people, privacy and authenticity are really important when it comes to anything that deals with communication, money, etc., and the only way to ensure that at the highest level is for Fedi itself to eventually be open source,” he added.
The other main reason has to do with following trends in Bitcoin and the broader free tech sector.
“The second thing is we’re part of the freedom technology community and the bitcoin community,” Nwosu said.
“Five years ago, for an organization like ours, the idea of open sourcing[our code]would have seemed really weird, if not insane. Our prediction is that five years from now it will be insanity to be closed source, and we are seeing that transition,” he added.
“That’s the future. We’re just getting ahead of it.”
In a world where it’s much easier to replicate apps, Nwosu isn’t worried that Fedi copycats will surpass what the company is offering.
“We realized that what’s going to have enduring power is the network effect and the human element of business,” Nwosu says, “so we built a business model that really leverages human networks, which can’t be easily replicated.”
Global Recruitment
Fedi is currently focusing most of its efforts on the Global South, including regions like Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, but the goal is eventually for “everyone everywhere” to be using Fedi, Nwosu said.
But the company is starting in the Southern Hemisphere because it plans to meet the needs of those who are often left behind, which will ultimately meet the needs of everyone.
“When you look at the pyramid of users and needs, if you focus on the top few percent of users, it becomes very difficult to reach segments of users that may have fewer resources and assets,” Nwosu explained.
“If the car you’re making is a Ferrari, it’s very difficult to make that car for everyone. But if the car you’re making is a VW Golf, it’s very easy for people who can afford more than a VW Golf to stick with a VW Golf,” he added.
“Focusing on the most underpowered communities will result in products and tools that work for everyone, not just a few. If you’re aiming for the widest funnel, you should be trying to reach as wide as possible, which means starting to focus on the people you would normally focus on at the end, rather than the beginning.”
Also, people around the world are struggling to manage and use Bitcoin, and Fedyo’s approach of providing human support to users could help Bitcoin function as its intended purpose: peer-to-peer electronic cash.
“Software alone can’t solve this problem,” Nwosu said. “If we want this to be used as a means of exchange, it has to be a combination of software and people.”
