Dmitry Murashchik's contract with Mycelium ended on April 1st. He volunteers with the Bitcoin wallet company, and the token crowdsale remains a source of tension with investors. On a recent episode of
Dmitry Murashchik's contract with Mycelium ended on April 1st. He volunteers with the Bitcoin wallet company, and the token crowdsale remains a source of tension with investors. On a recent episode of The Crypto Show, Murashchik sat down with co-hosts Chris Neandrathal and Danny Somthin to discuss the state of the crowdsale, investor disappointment, revenue plans, and his continued confidence in the project.
Token holders have voiced discontent since the sale last year. Murashchik addressed the grievances head-on. Many investors had assumed the tokens would trade on exchanges within weeks of the sale closing. "I'm sure some of them were expecting that these tokens were like altcoins that you can just trade on the market," Murashchik said.
Exchanges never listed the tokens for two distinct reasons. Mycelium had issued them on the Colu colored coins protocol, which exchanges had not integrated into their systems. Exchanges saw the trading volume as too low to warrant implementation. Beyond that, exchanges balked at listing a token representing an actual stake in a company, given the regulatory complications.
Murashchik carried his own frustrations about how the sale unfolded. "There were, honestly, some things I was told would happen, which I told people would happen, which did not happen," he said. "I'm pretty pissed about that." The company had promised quarterly financial reports to token holders, and those reports never appeared. Much of the proceeds went to legal costs—more than investors anticipated—draining resources that could have gone to product development.
Some token buyers also misunderstood what they were buying. "There was some [confusion]," Murashchik said. "They were hoping they would be buying the whole company, and thought it was unfair they were only buying the wallet." The company had offered the wallet in the crowdsale because its other projects were still too experimental. "We sold only the thing that we were fairly certain was actually going to start making money, which it's actually starting to do now," he explained.
The development timeline had lagged behind Murashchik's expectations. "I was really expecting to be able to hire a lot of developers and be able to push this fast; unfortunately, we were expecting to have something done by at least December or January, but unfortunately, due to funding running out faster than expected, us not being able to hire many developers, and a lot of unexpected delays with regards to the actual coding itself, we are a lot further behind than I had hoped," he said. But the company was not shutting down. "It's not that we're quitting or disappearing; it's that, unfortunately, it's taking a very long time."
On revenue, Mycelium planned to add third-party plugins to the wallet—a monetization approach other Bitcoin wallets like Breadwallet had considered. Murashchik framed it as an "Apple App Store of cryptocurrency" where the wallet manages private keys while outside firms integrate their own services. The company had added an exchange, credit card purchasing through a partner, a Purse.io partnership, and affiliate revenue from Trezor hardware wallet sales. These plugins were generating enough money to cover nearly one developer's salary, with three or four developers on the payroll.
For token holders to profit, Mycelium first needed to reach profitability. At that point, the company could convert to a public security and begin paying dividends. "But the idea is that as the company grows, the value of your stake would actually grow as well," Murashchik said. For now, the company focused on switching to an SPV model and expanding monetization.
Murashchik maintained his confidence in Mycelium despite the crowdsale's fallout. User numbers and revenue climbed, he said, and he saw nothing malicious in the company's operations. "I don't think there's malicious stuff going on with the company," Murashchik said. "At worst, it's differences in priorities [between the CEO and the backend developers]." The CEO was putting his own money into the company to keep it running. If that funding ran out, Murashchik believed the developers would continue the project as an open-source side effort, following the Electrum model. "I don't know how much money [the CEO] has, but he's still pumping it in," Murashchik said.
