By Staff Writer
Geoff McCabe, co-founder and CEO, of Divi takes us through his company and how his firm is revolutionizing the crypto industry one step at a time.
Q: Please introduce Divi to our audience?
Divi’s primary slogan is “Crypto Made Easy” and is focused on building the world’s most user-friendly ecosystem that takes a multi-currency approach, mixing DIVI, other cryptos, and fiat currency into a single platform. It’s secondary slogan “Divi Everywhere” intends to make DIVI easy to get and use on a variety of other platforms, such as wrapped versions of DIVI on other blockchains, inclusion in other wallets, and as many onramps and apps as possible. It also has a long-term goal of driving fees to close to zero for sending, exchanging, or storing cryptos.
Divi is the inventor of the multi-tiered Masternode network, as well as a weekly “lottery block” technology. Together with staking, its tokenomics provide three ways for coin holders to earn more DIVI when supporting the network. Together with its community focused approach, this has led it to become the second best-performing ICO since May 2017, having achieved a current market valuation of $80 million after raising only $2.6 million.
As (currently) the only crypto to also own its own fintech (Ridivi) the company is on its way to achieving its goal to drive scarcity for its coin by putting easy access to crypto in the hands of everyone in the world with a cell phone. Currently it’s various sub-teams, partners and communities are building a variety of use cases such as gaming, a digital nomad space, media/entertainment, merchant solutions, and DeFi applications as it leads the way into the coming age of cryptocurrency mass adoption.
The product-focused team is led by Geoff McCabe, a physicist with over thirty years experience building startups in a variety of markets, and backed by a C-suite of executives with an average experience of over twenty-five years.
Q: How did you end up starting Divi?
I started in 2014, buying Ripple because I heard it was supported by Google and I figured it would be the next big thing after Bitcoin. I didn’t know anything about crypto at the time, but I loved technology. I was immediately struck by how ridiculously user-UNfriendly everything was. I very rapidly lost all my XRP (which I had purchased for under a penny) in the JustCoin exchange hack and that really cemented in my mind the need for a product and user-focused approach to cryptos, if mass adoption was ever to be achieved. When I had the chance later, in early 2017, to do my own project, the “Crypto Made Easy” idea was an obvious problem to solve.
Q: What is Ridivi?
Ridivi is our Costa Rica-based fintech. We can issue IBAN accounts worldwide, run an exchange, and have a full suite of MSB licenses. With Ridivi we can directly connect users to the world’s central bank system without having to beg a banking partner for access and risk getting dropped. And because we own 30% of Ridivi, we can comply with the FATFA “Travel Rule” allowing us to pass user data in the background. This is really a secret weapon for us and “Unfair competitive advantage”. What this means is that we can do KYC/AML in our products, such as our mobile wallet, and then users can open and use a fiat bank account, use our exchange, and do many things without redoing their KYC all over again, massively reducing friction. With this we can add features like a one-click bank account setup, or no-click automatic exchanges. For example, a user could set an incoming crypto address to automatically break up all incoming funds into a variety of new value tokens, such as 10% Bitcoin, 20% gold-pegged token, 20% DIVI, 50% Tether. Or something like that, leading to many new use cases.
Q: What are the main challenges you are facing with regards to scaling?
One of the biggest challenges is just psychological. People look at our UTXO-based blockchain with our one-minute blocks, and sometimes feel like it’s an old technology compared to the much faster DPoS blockchains today that process thousands of transactions per second. Our blockchain can already natively process 20x what Bitcoin can, which serves millions of users even in its current state. We will add a lightning type network called Chain Lightning for off-chain scaling. But the most important way that we’re scaling is by making a variety of wrapped DIVI “flavors” that live on other networks such as Ethereum, PolkaDot, NEAR, WAX, etc. Wherever there’s a good use case, some version of DIVI will be there. Eventually, it’s likely that the majority of xDIVI use will be on other chains, with our mother chain being used as sort of a master accounting system.
Q: How are Divi masternodes supporting your ecosystem and what plans do u have to grow your ecosystem?
We have both staking and “master” validator-type nodes. This is really just the beginning. We created our MOCCI system so anyone, without any experience in setting up nodes, can launch them with a single click into the cloud. We have many grandparents running nodes from their laptops. Soon you’ll be able to do it from your phone as well. This gives us a critical advantage in the long race towards mass adoption, because our network isn’t just geeks and devs. It’s made up of businesspeople, finance experts, artists and designers, and just ordinary users. The feedback and connections we’re getting from this diverse network are extremely valuable and essential in our quest to make crypto much easier than it is today.
In addition, our MOCCI program will allow users to set up multiple node types in their droplets, or multiple droplets. So with a few clicks, users can be running a full Bitcoin node, or a Lightning Network node, or a Divi staking node, or nodes that store and serve data. This “Multinode One Click Cloud Installer”, which uses unique patent pending processes, is a game-changer that give us another long-term competitive advantage.
Q: How will Divi evolve in the future?
The most important thing that we’re doing now is building REAL use cases. Not just tech demos but real uses for crypto and blockchain that solve real problems. Not just for DIVI but all our favorite cryptocurrencies and partners. We aren’t Divi maximalists and we have seen so many other cryptocurrencies build stuff that nobody but their small community uses. So our use cases will include all the most important communities in every App to expand the potential market. Within these apps, however, DIVI reigns supreme because of our high staking percentage (currently at 25% or so). We’re currently building video games (siegeworlds.com), an NFT-based comic book / media platform (lightningworks.io), an e-sports play (chalkapp.co) and others, all targeting what we refer to as The Blockchain Generation, which is Millenials and younger. Each of these use cases needs to be really good and able to compete in the general market without being just a blockchain/crypto gimmick. This is where our team’s vast experience in designing real products comes in and gives us another advantage.
DiviGo 2.0 will also launch soon, giving Divi as second platform to build features into. This allows users to send/receive/store crypto in Whatsapp and will also be in SMS, Telegram, Twitter, etc. Any social media platform with an SDK will find DIVI and our partner cryptos in it.
