We talk to Moolah’s creator about ATM and crypto banking service –
We talk to Moolah’s creator about ATM and crypto banking service -We’ve been hitting you guys up with lots of interviews with new coin developers recently. So, let’s give those guys a break! This time around, we spoke with Alex, the creator of Moolah. You may have heard of Moolah as the maker of an upcoming BTC/DOGE ATM. Or you may know them for their other upcoming services. Whether you’ve heard of Moolah or not, I guarantee you’ll be hearing more about them in the future. So read on, and see what Alex had to say about the new business. —–BRENDON LINDSEY:В Thanks for taking the time to talk with us about Moolah, Alex. It’s definitely something that we’ve been increasingly hearing about lately. В First off, what made you decide to work on Moolah? What was the point where you said to yourself, You know, I have this great idea. в? ALEX (MOOLAH):В About 7 months ago now, I was working on a relatively boring company (banking) as a senior developer and realized how much I actually hated it. I decided I wanted to do something off of my own back, and a rough concept for a cryptographic payments platform was born. It was originally focused on physical products (such as our ATM units) and ended up expanding from there. В A lot of people have probably heard of Moolah from your announcement of the ATM. But Moolah is more than just that. Can you explain briefly what other services Moolah will provide to consumers and merchants? We’re a full stack payments platform and online banking service all in one. For consumers, we provide a secure account service with support for wallets in multiple currencies, the ability to send coins by email, generate gift cards and offline wallets… if there is a viable feature, we’ll end up including it. We’ll be announcing our range of NFC debit cards in the near future (that will work with our ATM units and merchant payment terminals). On the merchant side, we make it easy for stores to accept cryptographic currency, both online and in-store. We’re working on the legality of automatic conversion to FIAT and hope to have something in place within the next 4 weeks. To make it even easier to get started as a merchant with cryptographic currency, we’ll soon be launching a crypto marketplace where people can sign up and list their products, and we take care of the rest. We want the ease and security of online banking, with the expansion and feature possibilities that cryptographic currencies support. I’m sure there’s a lot of stress on your end in regards to ensuring that all your users will be protected, especially since being out in the public like this you’ll be an enticing target for hackers. Why do you think a service like Moolah is important? And what steps are you going to take to protect user accounts from illicit access whether it’s due to someone getting into the system, or a user accidentally leaving their account logged in at a library. It’s important because we make it even easier to adopt cryptographic currency, both for consumers and merchants. The average user does not want to go through the hassle of downloading a client that syncs the blockchain, and then maintaining that. They then have to take care of their own security (local viruses, etc) and backup policies. If they lose their wallet. dat, they have lost their funds. Within an account, each wallet can have an additional security method set. So to send funds from an account, you would have to enter a specific PIN number or password. If you accidentally leave yourself logged in and have this set, nobody can tinker with your funds. The accounts also support two-factor authentication, and we’ll shortly be introducing login timeouts (10 minutes without activity). Everything we do is encrypted, everything is transmitted securely. Backend servers are hidden from the public internet and completely locked down. We have an extensive security policy in place. Your ATM has to be the thing you’re asked about the most. You’re probably glad about that, given you created Moolah based around the idea of the ATM. В You mention in the ATM features that if an ATM doesn’t have the funds to cover a purchase of BTC or DOGE, that you will cover the shortfall for some merchants. Can you explain how that works? Are these ATMs aimed more toward users who want to sell BTC/DOGE and already have some available? Or will it also be a way for small shops to collectively sell currency from Moolah’s holdings in exchange for a small cut? Both! The unit can run in one two modes mode. In standalone mode, you can point it at a bitcoind, dogecoind and litecoind endpoint via RPC or using our API library and have it handle the fulfilment completely. In this mode, the existence of Moolah is irrelevant. In linked mode, more possibilities are unlocked. Orders are fulfilled from your Moolah Wallet and you can either top this up yourself or buy the coins from us. For some merchants (subject to credit worthiness), we’ll even extend a line of cryptocredit where if somebody wants more than you have, we’ll cover the excess and bill you for it accordingly. Going even further, we’re in the middle of finalizing an agreement for merchants to automatically topup their accounts in this scenario with a credit/debit card, which means you don’t even need to bother holding a reserve balance to begin with. Speaking of cuts, if I want to set up an ATM, I the total cost the cost of the unit + shipping? Or is Moolah collecting a fee for each transaction, on top of the seller’s fee? That’s right, the total cost is the unit plus shipping. We don’t collect any fees. We’ll be distributing a few units ourselves in order to collect some though! The operator can choose to either put a markup on the exchange rates, set a per transaction fee… or both! For users, will there be any way to search through the Moolah network? Maybe see which machines have available balances ahead of time, and what the going rate for a BTC/DOGE on it is? Yes! Operators can opt in or out of having this information shown however. What made you decide to start with BTC and DOGE, instead of BTC and LTC, as most people would? A leap of faith in the microtransactional capability and potential uptake of DOGE. We now support all three, but I’m glad we went with DOGE first. Lastly, is there anything about Moolah that you want more people to know? Or that some people may not have seen or heard? We’re awesome, use our services. We’d like to again thank Moolah for answering some of our questions. If you’d like to learn more about the service or the ATM, you can do so at their official website. Moolah’s services are entering beta soon, and existing ATM orders will be shipped out by the end of March. If you’d like to keep up on when ATMs are open for order again, you can do so by following the official Moolah Twitter account, @moolah_ch.
