Kosala Hemachandra is the founder and CEO of MyEtherWallet (MEW), one in all crypto’s true OG merchandise and a pockets that has been onboarding customers to Ethereum for the reason that community’s mainnet launch. Eleven years, three million customers, and a workforce of greater than twenty later, MEW is positioning itself as a self-custodial residence not only for crypto however for tokenized shares, bonds, and the broader real-world asset economic system now arriving on-chain.
Why it is best to hear
Kosala’s origin story is a reminder of how far this business has travelled. A pc engineering graduate who found Ethereum by way of Bitcoin, he constructed MEW as a result of accessing the community at launch meant the command line and nothing else. The earliest MEW customers have been nearly completely technical; at present’s customers, against this, usually don’t know which chain their property are sitting on – and that’s the level. Andy and Kosala dig into the decade-long rigidity on the coronary heart of self-custody: balancing real consumer sovereignty with an onboarding expertise that doesn’t terrify newcomers. Mnemonic phrases have been “bread and butter” for ten years for a cause – any proprietary repair would lock customers in and break the very portability that makes self-custody significant – however advances like account abstraction, social restoration, and good contract wallets are lastly pointing towards a extra humane future.
The dialog covers tokenized shares and real-world property, the place Kosala sees essentially the most profound shift of his profession. TradFi went from hostile to crypto eight years in the past to actively partnering with it at present, and MEW is leaning into that convergence by providing tokenized equities alongside crypto property in a single self-custodial pockets. Kosala makes use of his residence nation of Sri Lanka as an illustration: six months in the past, a Sri Lankan investor wanting US inventory publicity confronted brokerage friction, 10–15% taxes, and layered commissions. Now they will merely maintain tokenized Nvidia or Tesla in a MEW pockets. He additionally walks by way of the distinction between USDC and yield-bearing stablecoins like Ondo’s USDY (which is backed by authorities bonds), and why this class collapses the outdated workflow of “purchase stablecoin → bridge to Aave or Compound → lend → harvest yield” right into a single token you simply maintain.
On regulation, Kosala is candid: US customers are presently locked out of tokenized property and there’s no shortcut, however the trajectory of the final decade provides him actual confidence the foundations will catch up. The larger wager is that MEW evolves into a worldwide, full-service, self-custodial wealth platform – one login, one set of keys, publicity to crypto, fiat, RWAs, and conventional yield devices with out ever surrendering custody. The episode closes with particulars on MEW’s reside $100,000 Power Marketing campaign (factors for swaps, transactions, and tweets convert into possibilities at $5–$10 of tokenized US equities) plus an hourly $5 swap reward for early customers. The recent take spherical delivers Kosala’s tidy framing of Bitcoin as gold and Ethereum as USD, a robust vote of confidence in AI-driven portfolio administration as a future that’s already right here for the few, and a Christopher Nolan choose to shut issues out.
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