Most people familiar with the genesis of cryptocurrencies know that it dates back to 2009 as a direct result of the 2008 financial crisis. Big Finance and Big Banking caused that crisis as a result of offering and selling sketchy financial products such as housing loans to risky applicants, securities backed by subprime mortgages, and under-collateralized credit default swaps.

Institutions re-packaged, bundled, and sold those assets that created and inflated a bubble that shook economies around the globe when it popped.

Interest rate reboots to zero percent or lower, as well as hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts flowed from governments to save institutions, industries, and economies because they were deemed too big and important to fail. With taxpayers picking up the tab.

Bitcoin and blockchain were conceived as a peer-to-peer monetary alternative that sidestepped the government monopoly on currency.

For more than 12 years, the cryptocurrency space has continued to grow, expand, and continue to make inroads into mass adoption.

It seems that banking, finance, and government institutions continue to pull profits and power from the same bag of tricks ranging from predatory lending, printing infinite amounts of money, and rigging inflation numbers to artificially control interest on crushing government debt.

Sean Rach is a co-founder of crypto-exchange and financial literacy portal, hi. In his exclusive interview with DailyCoin, he said they launched hi because banks and lenders haven’t learned their lesson.

“The whole way banks make money doesn’t make any sense. How they create a new fee to charge someone, doesn’t make sense. That put the fire in the belly to launch hi. And that led us to start the process of the business planned whitepaper, and that led us to say okay, it looks like it’s possible. Obviously, we have a lot more work to do, but let’s get ahead and proceed. So that really took us from the beginning of this year until about May 10th, when we opened up our private beta test and started the whole onboarding of new members,”

he said.

Rach explained that hi is a not-for-profit membership site that provides benefits to users at different investment levels. Member benefits include feeless banking, high-interest staking, and 100 currencies to buy, sell, or exchange.

He went on to say that not only are they committed to building financial literacy among all users, but they’re committed to building a bridge between crypto and sovereign currencies.

“We want to be able to offer both fiat and crypto services because fiat is what people have. So, we want traditional currencies to be able to work with digital. Initially, we’ll work with license partners, who will allow us to manage the foreign exchanges as well as the transfer of traditional currencies, to the point where we can have our own licenses and be able to provide that. All of those services normally are available to be provided, but every financial institution adds a markup. Our philosophy, given what I’ve said, is yes there are costs, but we’re not going to mark things up. And when you put that together it becomes quite a competitive advantage,”

said Rach.

Another thing that banking institutions get wrong, is making it difficult for individuals to apply and engage for financial services in the first place.

“Banks have been treating us poorly. When you look particularly in the financial area you’ve got an issue of speed, which I don’t think they know what the word ‘speed’ means. It’s 3-to-5 business days to send money, well you darn well know they can send it in seconds. They’re earning interest on your money while they’re waiting to give it to you. The idea of ‘service,’ again, another word they don’t seem to understand,”

he said.

On The Flipside

• While hi promotes itself as a not-for-profit, it is not a charity. Rach says that anything above that amount will be returned to members in the form of enhanced benefits.

Watch the full interview here: