We dream of a world where owning and using your money is no longer complicated and investing and transacting is as simple as sending an email.
Zengo’s mission is to end financial exclusion and break the barriers of complexity by building the most accessible and safest wallet service that enables anyone to thrive in the digital economy.
Personal finance without borders
Since the dawn of time, progress has always been about removing friction, borders, and constraints on social and economic opportunities. However, personal finance is still a privilege reserved to very few, excluding the majority either because of its complexity or unavailability.
Since the financial system is essentially built on the legacy rails of fiat-backed currencies and dated technologies, it is siloed, insanely complex, costly to participants, abused by central powers, and insecurely protected.
In the internet era, where everyone aspires for more freedom, everything is built around and by financial gatekeepers. Whether they are banks, money transmitters, music labels, app stores, exchanges; gatekeepers are not fit to face and service the future. The digital economy has to be served by a new economic paradigm
The next phase for our societies and economies has come so that anyone, anywhere can seamlessly be part of a thriving economy without discrimination: gender, age, race, religion, technical expertise, or even education should never be a factor for financial inclusion.
Recent global crises (in particular COVID19), the steep loss of value and trust in the USD, dramatic economic meltdowns of certain countries, distrust in institutions, and the new realities of entire industries now based on remote working have emphasized the need for monetary progress and made it urgent. We live in a time of transition to a new form of economy that is needed and will make the world a better place: a place with more freedom to access financial services and economical wealth everywhere.
A borderless economy is coming
We believe every asset that represents or enables our economies and societies to be digitized and natively represented on blockchains. Being represented electronically in a centralized database is not good enough; we need indisputable, verifiable proofs of existence and ownership, mathematically coded and represented, in order for anyone to verify and use, trade, send, or receive them.
Fiat Money, Identity, Contracts, Art, Debts and Credit, Signatures, Car ownership, Home keys, Insurance, Gaming items, and even voting… All those assets will be represented, created, and stored on a blockchain. As this happens, new economic opportunities will be unlocked, removing friction and financial discrimination based on geographical, legal, and technical constraints.
The digitization of assets will enable a true borderless economy where anyone in the world can simply and freely participate without permission, restriction, or technical background and assistance: fast and cheap remittance anywhere, instant access to credit to build thriving businesses, simple invoicing and payments for independent workers, asset trading and more.
This new economy will consist of traditional businesses (that will operate within this new status quo and use digital native “money”); as well as built by new digitally “crypto” native businesses that would not exist before the world of blockchains.
Crypto native assets can only exist because blockchain technologies made them possible. Their scarcity and unique value proposition could not have existed otherwise: Digital art, Crypto domain names, Game items, and mechanics, Decentralized financial services, and more. A new breed of economic services will rise and bring new borderless opportunities because everyone will be able to access them in a few taps and will have ownership and control
A borderless Bank is needed
To enable this evolution, every person will need a digital trusted interface (often called a wallet) to own, control and manage their digital assets and use them to transact, trade and build their wealth.
Traditional banks can not serve as the interface because they are tied to legal and technological rails that entrench them into a controlled, exclusive, and expensive to operate financial walled-garden. This prevents them from adapting or being adopted by the new audiences, as well as handling new demands and global economic realities of customers in search of more financial freedom.
In a world where everything is digital-first, control, safety and simplicity are critical so that people have peace of mind. Since this time, users are in control, technology will need to provide better ways to guarantee safe access, management, recovery, and operational safety to this borderless economy.
Wallets will play a critical and central part as primary trusted gateways to this borderless economy. The frontier between wallets and exchanges will blur even more. Wallets will be as important as traditional banks were to traditional money.
Wallets will essentially act as borderless, user-controlled financial remote controls, and the gateways to a global digital economy.
A borderless bank will not lock funds with complex mechanisms or artificial fee structures, but rather offer simple, clear, and upfront services, putting customer delight at the center.
Zengo: the age of true simplicity has arrived
Zengo’s mission is to enable anyone, anywhere, to actively participate in the borderless economy simply and safely.
Zengo is building a borderless financial service that will support all relevant native crypto protocols, digital assets, and financial services. It will integrate and play respectfully with legacy rails and rules in order to facilitate the necessary transition from the bordered-economy to a borderless economy.
But this is a difficult task to take on, and we want to address it in the right way.
It starts with our deep commitment to operate on-chain.
Crypto, let’s admit it, has lost its soul.
The majority of crypto funds are stored in custodian centralized services that are just convenient shortcuts and new iterations of finance 1.0. Centralized, complex and costly, some do not even let you withdraw your funds: the opposite of what crypto was supposed to bring to the world
Why build what the legacy financial world has already built?
What sense of ownership do you have if funds are owned by others while cutting you off the digital economy? And why alternative, non-custodial wallets have failed so far to provide the sense of safety and simplicity that is more easily achieved in custodial services?
Well, not any more.
It is finally possible, thanks to Multi-party computation, to build on-chain wallet services that are user-controlled, comparable, and even better in quality, user experience and security than custodian counter-parts.
Being “on-chain” is not just the only way to truly serve the industry’s greater goal but also the default to which every financial service will end up going because it will bring significant economic advantages, true transparency, openness, and universal access. We believe this is inevitable and it is already happening before our eyes as we see funds flow out of exchanges.
Zengo’s core principles
- In a world where the primary data device is the mobile phone, Zengo is mobile-first to enable anyone, anywhere to access crypto finance.
- In a world where passwords have made our digital lives less safe, Zengo is passwordless, so hacks will be much harder and human errors near impossible
- In a world where software complexity increases, Zengo is simple and designed so that the complexity of onboarding, supporting any digital asset, transacting and trading is abstracted away and leave room for a delightful experience.
- In a world where Crypto itself is becoming increasingly difficult to understand and use, Zengo is usable by anyone, and offer the best of Crypto without requiring any knowledge from our customers.
- In a world in which a new economy will undoubtedly intimidate some, Zengo is always here to help. With Zengo, you will never feel alone in the new borderless economy.
- In a world where trust is hard to earn, Zengo offers solutions built on open-source cryptography and minimized-trust services, where users are always in control and feel peace of mind, even if we stop operating at any point in time.
- In a world where noise and shortcuts to success are everywhere, we build a team driven by this mission, looking to the outcome of a long term revolution and making choices together that serve a better future for our customers.
The future of financial services will be a thin layer of software on your phone, controlled partially or totally by its users, powered by math and cryptography, decentralized enough to resist censorship, but easy enough for anyone to use, so they can participate and build a better life.
