Good morning everyone. Good morning. I just wanted to do a quick sound check.
I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Merrick menu to request to speak.
So for those tuning in, I am joined by Laura Co-founders, Jackie Bonat and Marical Shepsky.
This is my one. Good morning.
Thank you for joining us.
This February, Valour celebrated the two-year anniversary of our public launch, and I'll be speaking with Jackie and Merrick on what we've built so far and the exciting projects and potential we have in store. And then we'll leave space at the end to answer any questions and feedback from our community, so make sure to request to speak in the
Twitter Space's chat. So Jackie Merrick, thanks so much for joining us. Let's set the scene. It's 2021. Take me back to the sea laps team at that time. Tell me about the early days of Valora. Sure, yeah, I can start. Yeah.
2021 was definitely an exciting year. That was the year that Valora spun out of CLabs. But before I talk about 2021, I think it might make sense to go back a little further because Valora's origin actually starts all the way back as far as
2018, which was, you know, I think, sounds very far away right now, especially after the bear market. And in some ways, very reminiscent of this bear market, 2018 was kind of the start of
the earlier one. But that was a time where I was, you know, taking a break after selling the first company that I worked on and not really doing much, I would say,
other than trying to get some much needed rest. And, you know, we were thinking like, what can we do next? You were searching for, like, really good thing to focus on. And we wanted to do something big, something mission driven, something impactful.
And we created a list of 100 different ideas. And one of those ideas was a global Venmo wallet that used crypto rails. And that, I think the second it made it on the list instantly became kind of our favorite
Now we really loved what was happening in the broader crypto ecosystem, your big believers of self-custody and the impact that I could have to people who have been traditionally excluded from today's financial infrastructure. You know, 1.1 billion people don't even have government recognized IDs.
and are completely excluded from bank accounts. And so that was really the impetus for what now has become for Laura. But it started off initially as a wallet that we were trying to build on top of Ethereum. And we realized
early on that we couldn't quite create the experience that we wanted. And that's ultimately what took us down the path of creating a Web3 platform, an EVM chain that had some bonus features that would allow us to build really easy to use mobile wallet. And so that's ultimately what
led to the development of cello, fast forward to 2020, you know, the community, the cello ecosystem launched the cello chain. It was really kind of a great site to see, you know, almost at the beginning of the pandemic on Earth Day 2020, and then finally,
Finally, we had a platform that the Polora could kind of launch on something that had the ability to be for gas with stable points, something that had phone verification as a first class citizen of the platform.
and you know a client that actually worked on mobile devices. And so at the time we were building a Valora, we didn't have a name for it and I'm sure Jackie will share more about the name, but in terms of the name,
2021 we were finally ready to launch it and we did so with Panfare. It was a really amazing moment. The team was just incredibly proud. And that's when investors started getting interested and ultimately led to the spin-out. So yeah, that's the story.
great story. I always love when you hear you tell it. I can tell a little bit more about the origins of the name Valora. As Marik mentioned, back in 2020, this all community had launched, made that and basically kicked off
the ability for an application like Valorant to live and to thrive. For me, I mean, going back to really, why did I want to work on SELLO in the first place and start spending my time on this?