With over 3 million users, Coinomi is one of the most used crypto wallets in the space. Established in 2014, Coinomi has not only aided in crypto adoption, but they also pioneered in the creation of multi-chain wallets. Their hunger for innovation continues to this day. In a chat with CULT.Today, Coinomi talks about their past, present and some challenges in the DeFi space.
Tell us about the early days of Coinomi? What drove George Kimionis to establish Coinomi?
Our founder has a very strong financial and technical background having worked extensively with several Banks and ForEx brokers, so when Bitcoin was born, it was natural that it would arouse strong interest. Soon, Bitcoin’s immutability, uncensorability and security presented an obvious paradigm shift that our founder believed in from the get-go, and contributed in several Bitcoin projects, including the actual Bitcoin code.
Was he involved in BitcoinLib too?
Yes, a little-known fact is that he also started and contributed most of the code for BitcoinLib, an open-source bitcoin library for the .net framework upon which many exchanges and payment services were built in the past few years.
When did Coinomi come about?
As more coins started emerging, the need for a secure multi-chain wallet became apparent—remember that in those early days, people used to run separate wallets in their devices, one for each coin. Therefore, the decision was made to build a secure multi-chain wallet that would ensure users are always in control of their funds and enjoy true ownership, while seamlessly interacting with multiple blockchains at once with anonymity and privacy. This is how Coinomi came about and has since evolved to a swiss-knife for all things crypto. We believe we’re still early in this journey, and we are always busy rewarding our users’ preference with more functionality and services, as mentioned above.
The fact that people can lend and borrow funds while retaining ownership, without the need for intermediaries, was unthinkable just a few years back
Any trends that you have observed that’s going to further disrupt the banking sector.
As discussed previously in our chat, we believe that the innovation and growth we are currently seeing on DeFi will play a major role towards general adoption. The fact that people can lend and borrow funds while retaining ownership, without the need for intermediaries, was unthinkable just a few years back. However, we would urge a bit of caution in these early exciting stages – not all projects will be truly decentralised, not all will be legit, and there will always be exploits and bugs that need to be dealt with. The meticulous auditing of smart contracts and oracles, governance models, as well as the project teams themselves, becomes more and more crucial and important as adoption grows and more funds are entering DeFi platforms.
What other challenges you see in this space?
Remember that it’s all built on top of ETH, which has not been without its own challenges, and will soon go through some fundamental changes (2.0, PoS, etc) that have not yet been tested in production environments. Coinomi will strive to collaborate with the best and brightest of that particular and growing niche of the market, and become the to-go platform for DeFi in the future.
