Billionaire and crypto hustle veteran Anthony Di Iorio, founder of the Jaxx wallet-maker Decentral, retired this week to focus on “philanthropic energies,” he told CoinDesk.
The ethereum co-founder will continue funding Decentral and approving budgets as chairman of the board. In the intervening time, former product manager Maggie Xu, Di Iorio’s girlfriend of two years, will take the helm as the company’s new CEO.
“If she develops a roadmap, dispenses it to me, it will be approved depending on which resources she needs,” Di Iorio said. “I’m happy to agree to continue funding [Decentral] if it frames sense.”
Stepping back, in 2018 Di Iorio said the crypto wallet had up to a million monthly users and had processed myriad than $2 billion worth of crypto swaps through a partnership with ShapeShift. Around this time final year, the company underwent an ambitious campaign to attract paid integrations with service providers, such as allowance startups and exchanges, and futuristic office plans with a hologram studio.
But then the bear market hit hard. Agreement fees from the ShapeShift integration were Decentral’s primary revenue flow, Di Iorio said, peaking at $300,000 a month. When ShapeShift started be lacking know-your-customer information last fall, revenue dwindled to a pittance. Decentral laid off almost half of its staff, he said, down to the 14 hands it has today.
Decentral is hiring again these days, a few developer positions, because it runs nearly a dozen nodes to abundance integrations and data flows across the assets supported in the mobile app. Xu told CoinDesk they’ve finally secured five integration partnerships, grouping GiftPay and Changelly, which should allow users to convert tokens inside the app and spend them with fiat-denominated offering cards by 2020.
“We need to add the functions people care about, which is being able to buy and sell crypto, convert it to fiat and send it, while assembly other people in the community,” Xu said. “We’re looking to bring back Decentral meetups.”
As a former lawyer and product usher, Xu said her combination of expertise will help make growing and marketing the business more seamless.
Over the next six months, Xu contemplates to prioritize these integrations and seek funding through “strategic partnerships.” She added the newest version of the mobile notecase, Jaxx Liberty, garnered 250,000 downloads over the past year.
Xu concluded:
“This is about trying to motion this whole movement to the mainstream.”
Anthony Di Iorio image via Decentral