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On today's show:
The two co-founders of MyEtherWallet, one of the world's most popular Ethereum wallets have made the decision to go their own separate ways with their own separate wallets.
This kind of change can cause people a lot of concern so allow me to explain what is going on.
So MyEtherWallet then
https://www.myetherwallet.com/#view-wallet-info
This is a an online Ethereum wallet that has fast become one of the most important tools in the Ethereum ecosystem because it provides a way to store and manage all manner of Ethereum based ICOs and tokens.
In fact yesterday I conducted my 1 day crypto investing workshop and teaching the students about MyEtherWallet was a core part of the day.
The way I describe MyEtherWallet is like it is a sock puppet….
[slide info]
And as you can see when you go to MyEtherWallet.com:
https://www.myetherwallet.com/#view-wallet-info
You can drive it in a variety of different ways from software wallets to hardware wallets.
Suffice to say it has become very popular and is recommended by many ICO projects.
MyEtherWallet was co-founded by a lady called Taylor Monahan and fellow called Kosala Hemachandra back in 2015.
I never really heard much from the MyEtherWallet team beyond project updates and reassurance about potential scams etc.
Then came this Tweet:
https://twitter.com/mycrypto/status/961769008436400128
- mycrypto
Which announced that MyEtherWallet had rebranded as MyCrypto.
Which was weird because I wondered how they got over 80,000 followers on Twitter within a few days.
I think the answer to this is because this used to be the MyEtherWallet Twitter account and has been rebranded, including the account name itself.
This is confirmed by Kosala in this Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7wgnds/official_myetherwallet_statement/
This is also where he clarifies that he was the original creator and developer of MyEtherWallet and brought his friend Taylor on to help him out with the business end of things.
Long story short Taylor and Kosala have decided to end their business relationship and create their own competing versions of MyEtherWallet.
Kosala, the original developer behind MyEtherWallet will continue developing MyEtherWallet, albiet with a brand new Twitter account, and Taylor will lead her new project called MyCrypto with the old MyEtherWallet Twitter account rebranded as MyCrypto.
Then there is this blog post from the newly formed MyCrypto team which consists of many staff members that followed Taylor from MyEtherWallet:
https://medium.com/@MyCrypto/mycrypto-launch-faq-d6ce1178e9a0
You can read the details of what each intends to do but for me the single most important detail here, and one they both agree on in their published statements is that the decision to end their business relationship was mutual and amicable.
There is no character attacks in either of the messages and Kosala even wishes MyCrypto all the best.
While this split is amicable there is still a question mark over the rebranding of the MyEtherWallet Twitter account with the 80,000 followers.
Shouldn’t MyCrypto have created a new Twitter account for their new brand?
Probably yes, but then they’d have to rebuild that community of 80,000 followers from the ground up which is why they would have wanted to take the MyEtherWallet Twitter account with them.
There is an ethical question there and to my mind, I am erring on the side of saying that MyCrypto should have started their own Twitter account from scratch, even though it’s a bit of a hard slog building it back up again.
An article published by TechCrunch here:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/09/myetherwallet-fork/amp/
Also shares some observations which give clues as to why the two decided to split.
TechCrunch display the number of GitHub contributions of the two over time, so you might want to check that out and see what you make of it.
Ultimately the situation now is that there are two versions of what we used to know as MyEtherWallet.
There is the original MyEtherWallet.com and an almost identical version at MyCrypto.com.
For the time being, and as far as I can tell they function identically except for the domain name and the branding.
No doubt the more times goes on, the more different they will each become.
As always I highly recommend securing your Ethereum and associated ERC20 tokens using a hardware wallet in order to give yourself the confidence that whatever happens at the software level like this, your keys and money are safely protected.
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