Taylor Monahan: From Side Project to Center Stage – The Story of MyEtherWallet & MyCrypto (#317)

Many people find that the crypto-finance space is quite difficult for non-technical people to understand and interact with the technologies. Some projects and people have made tremendous progress in creating tools and interfaces that allow a broader audience to participate, speculate, and learn.

Taylor Monahan started MyEtherWallet as a side project in 2015, only for it to grow into one of the significant pieces of software people used to participate in the 2017 ICO boom. She has since "design-forked" the codebase and created MyCrypto, an open-source tool for generating ether wallets, handling ERC-20 tokens, and interacting with the blockchain with a clean and intuitive design.

Topics discussed in this episode:
- Taylor's background, and how she got into cryptocurrency
- What her experience was with Ethereum so early in the projects lifecycle
- How Reddit comments helped guide the feature list in the early days of MyEtherWallet
- How the DAO hack got her working full time on MyEtherWallet
- Building a project before “founding a company”
- Experiencing the ICO boom as the main wallet used to participate in token generation events
- Where MyCrypto is at today
- How Taylor wants MyCrypto to change the user experience in cryptocurrency
- Taylor’s view on centralized exchanges and view of the future

Links mentioned in this episode:
- MyCrypto Beta: http://bit.ly/2E1yQ6a
- #MyCryptoWinter is back! (Medium): http://bit.ly/2DZAS74
- Try The New MyCrypto! (Medium):
- MyCrypto Twitter: http://bit.ly/35aens6
- MyCrypto GitHub: http://bit.ly/2DZGcqW
- MyCrypto Discord: http://bit.ly/2seFwv6
- Taylor Monahan Twitter: http://bit.ly/2t57OJ5

Sponsors:
- Cosmos: Compete to win 100,000 ATOM by building and running Cosmos Zones - https://cosmos.network/goz/
- eToro: Automatically copy every trade of eToro's top crypto traders at the exact price in real-time - https://www.etoro.com/
- Pepo: -

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: https://epicenter.tv/317