Anti Danilevski

I tried to raise money for my game on Kickstarter, and out of $100K I raised $30. That’s when I realized that on Kickstarter, without hype and journalists, a regular startup has no chance. So I built my own platform — that was 2016. To avoid the startup barriers Kickstarter had back then — only a US legal entity, a bank account, tons of complexity — I built a platform on Ethereum, open to everyone, and called it KickICO. I launched it in spring 2017, and that’s when the ICO hype began — that’s how I entered crypto. We raised $23M on our own platform, which later turned into $80M — and my former partners, out of greed, lost it all. They didn’t even steal it, can you imagine? I gathered what was left — just $2M — rebuilt the team, rebuilt the platform, and launched the KickEX exchange. But of course you can’t build anything major in this market on $2M, and there’s zero support from so-called crypto funds or crypto investors — so the exchange had a hard time. It lasted until 2024; a Russian oil & gas company acquired it and shelved it in 2025.

And I went back to building from scratch and launched IMBA Wallet — a wallet, VISA/Mastercard cards for the unbanked, eSIM, gift cards for paying for services. Overall, we’re operating, people like it — thank God, people generally like what I do. That’s the story.

Described above.

Serial samurai founder in the web3/fintech space.

I’ve been through fire and water — 5 crises, 2 betrayals. I’ve been tempered in a way few people have, and I’ve learned not to give up, to get out of the hardest situations without burning out.

I always ship my startups and projects to release, and I always try to keep my word. It doesn’t always work out — like with KickEX — but I hope I’ll get rich again, buy it back, and bring it back to life. Maybe I’ll find investors for that, but I barely believe in investors — in crypto they either invest in what’s already generating strong revenue, or they don’t. Nobody in crypto supports anyone; that’s all fairy tales and PR.

We’re solving several problems at once. First — there are huge numbers of unbanked people in the world. That’s an enormous sector, for many different reasons. Second — expensive roaming. I once got charged $500 for a couple of days of internet abroad. Third — paying for services, games, iCloud, Google Play is inaccessible for many; even if they have cards, they often don’t work. Those are the problems we solve — accessibility, affordability, convenience, and speed.

Probably a lot of people still think USDT/crypto is very complicated. On the contrary — payments don’t get simpler than this.

Of course we’d still matter. It’s a huge market; there are many players, but few good ones. By my estimate, no more than 5% of the global market has been captured — so there’s plenty of room to grow for years ahead.

We become a global neobank with many local currencies, cards, and digital currencies. Cross-border transfers through us are simple, convenient, and accessible to everyone.

There’s no real difficulty with reach — it’s purely a matter of advertising and ad budgets. Our metrics are excellent, and we’re growing gradually — for now on organic, but we’re starting ads next week.

BTC’s correlation with global fiat markets and the US fiat market. That’s the biggest possible misconception. Markets can crash, USD can be printed by the trillions — but BTC is limited. It’s the best defensive asset on the planet, but people still don’t get it. And you get a paradoxical situation: markets fall, and instead of taking shelter in BTC, people sell BTC.

AI is definitely overhyped. Underrated? Probably the RWA market. It never really took off, even though the technology is excellent. I dream of someday restoring KickICO and rebuilding it for RWA — so any startup could raise investment from anywhere on the planet, fast, simply, and conveniently.

Stop correlating with the fiat market.

I’d get rid of every regulator, period. They bring 0% value and 100% harm. They’re supposed to protect and regulate, but in reality they protect nothing — they just drag the world of free finance toward the only model they understand: the fiat one.

That the crypto industry will be turned into a copy of the fiat system. It’s like the saying: never argue with a fool — he’ll drag the argument down to his level, and there you’ll lose for sure.

IMBA Wallet — I like building products that are actually useful to people, and our wallet is great. It’s convenient, fast, works everywhere — web, Telegram, Google Play, iOS — and once we add accounts, that too. It’s beautiful and fast, with 26 visual themes and 11 languages, and I really love that people genuinely like it. I use it myself every day, so I see every bug or UI inconsistency and can fix them very quickly.

Probably integrating Telegram Stars for payments across everything. It’s a completely new and unusual rail where crypto, fiat, and Telegram’s internal currency meet.

That hasn’t happened, and I hope it never will.

I look at what’s truly important. I evaluate every feature by ROI: the less time, effort, and resources it takes, and the more value it delivers, the more valuable it is. Features with low value and high development cost go to the backlog — or get cancelled entirely.

Whether to try legalizing in El Salvador again or not. We spent two years trying to get a full exchange license and never got it, despite all the fairy tales about how crypto-friendly it is. Not friendly at all. We submitted over a thousand pages of documentation, agreements, and other papers, and every time they asked for more and more and more, endlessly. So I’m weighing whether to try again, or whether it’ll end the same sad way. Even Max Keiser wrote — ignored. This goes back to the arrogance in crypto — it’s boundless. Nobody wants to help small companies; everyone has ten crowns on their head, yet on Twitter Max, Justin Sun, CZ — they all talk about how they help everyone. Don’t fall for it. It’s all lies.

That crypto means anonymity. No — crypto is the complete absence of anonymity, unlike fiat money.

No, I’d rather not talk about that.

Risk exists if you don’t know how to use something. If you don’t know how to use an axe, you can chop off a piece of your leg. Like any tool, you need to know how to use it — that doesn’t mean it’s inherently riskier.

Don’t talk about how much money you have, don’t show off, stay humble. And back up your wallet keys, encrypting them with an algorithm known only to you (or maybe your close ones / heirs). Though that mainly applies if you have a substantial amount.

There is no trust, and there shouldn’t be. And that’s correct.

El Salvador’s regulators killed KickEX, knowing perfectly well that investors would shut the exchange down if the license wasn’t granted — which is exactly what happened. That’s how it “shaped” things.

Only slowing. Their only goal is to make the crypto industry as hard as possible so the banks that pay them can live in peace. And the state and the security services, of course.

I don’t know any. Not really. Maybe Kazakhstan, or Belarus.

If they just left people alone and stopped getting in the way — but that’s not who regulators are; they don’t know how to do that.

I think decentralization will win, because it’s like water you’re trying to catch with a sieve — without understanding what water is, or what a sieve is.

I think there’s real potential. Agents will only be able to operate in decentralized finance; everything else simply won’t work because of the fiat swamp that traditional finance is — opaque, slow, full of human friction… It’s the Stone Age.

Bitcoin.

Hard to say — probably agents, agentic finance. But most likely that comes later; I don’t expect anything particularly special in 2026.

Again — I have a wallet with OTC market potential. I’m thinking about how to make it not only for people, but for agents. OTC for agents + cards that can pay for services — that could be very interesting and might work. Again, assuming we either start earning properly or raise investment.

Trusting partners when KickICO raised money. I went on vacation for three weeks, and in that time all of the company’s funds were carelessly lost. I trusted their years of business experience — turns out experience isn’t enough; you also need brains.

Two big fuckups.

1 — Whirl. I wanted to create a new kind of crowdfunding: you pay into someone’s project, your karma grows, and someone pays into yours. Like the film Pay It Forward. It didn’t work.

2 — Frozen Drop. We distributed tokens worth billions, but they were locked. People could unlock them through active trading on our exchange. But people didn’t get it, didn’t read, and tried to transfer and sell them. Every attempt burned blockchain fees — that’s how Ethereum works — and we caught a huge amount of negativity. I didn’t foresee that, and a great idea shattered against blockchain technical specifics. A shame.

I would’ve gone around every faucet and collected free BTC when they were giving it away by the thousands, of course.

See above.

If you want something done well — do it yourself. Don’t believe anyone is smarter than you; take responsibility, and don’t let anyone make important decisions in your life.

Today you can build anything yourself, with AI. Just do it, don’t be afraid — everything is solvable.

Life.

I don’t remember anymore — there were many different ones. Castaneda, probably.

They expect everything to be easy — it won’t be. When it gets hard, they quit — that’s a mistake. You need persistence and to get tempered in battle.

A central bank / regulator head — so something might actually change, and they’d stop trying to force crypto into fiat norms and crutches.

BTC, because of the 21 million hard cap.

Build, of course.

For me personally, CeFi — or CeDeFi. Not because DeFi is worse, but because it’s closer to me, clearer, and gives more room to implement different mechanics.

1

1

Pessimist

Brandy

Hardcore difficulty level

Cursor

None

IMBA Wallet of course

Only IMBA Wallet

There weren’t any good conferences, all is a farce.

No idea. With hardcore difficulty level, it’s a gamble.

Investments into IMBA Wallet :)

Stop looking at fiat markets when you deal with BTC.

Try IMBA, help us to get better!

Only inside IMBA Wallet. I want to add more blockchains, build OTC, build a lot of local fiat rails, add TON (or GRAM now?), add agentic wallets… a lot of things to add.

I’m just looking at the world and see what I personally require, and if it’s not being solved by someone else, I’m building it. Usually other people also find it useful.

Just organically, when you build something that people need, they come by themselves.

When I saw that people are coming, using our wallet, using our cards, etc.

I’ve raised a lot of money, and during ICO, it was amazing how easy it was. Too bad there were so many scams; if not this, we, builders, would be raising funds and building great things. But trust is gone, and that’s a biggest tragedy for the whole crypto industry. So many things will never be built because of greed.

Stupid regulations are killing the future. I’m not saying we don’t need regulations at all, but I am saying we don’t need stupid regulations that are obstacles, not helpers.

I just share my vision, and it always works.

It’s ridiculous, but in Russia, you’ll get funded if you are successful. I mean, if you are already profitable. If you are a startup — forget about it. It’s not like in the USA or other countries. VC doesn’t exist here, it’s all fake.

AI, web3, fintech.

Illusions. Founders think they are building something, but that thing is either useless or so huge that they won’t ever build it.

I love tokenomics, and love to build it. But now I think you must build a successful project that will actually utilize tokens, and only after that should work on tokenomics and go for TGE. Tokens MUST have a use, or it will lead to yet another round of losses for the people who trusted you.

I don’t know — everyone misunderstands something different; there’s nothing in common.

Any token is a scam if it has no real use case — and a strong one that people (or agents) actually need.

They’re all interesting; I don’t have a preference.

There are so many problems and complexities. I’d love to create my own blockchain designed for people, not geeks — one that businesses and startups could actually use. I have a vision, but I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to build it.

Seems like everything exists — even too much.

Building the exchange and implementing solid CFD mechanics. We never made it truly great — we ran out of time; investors froze KickEX.

I’m not a developer, so I can’t give that advice.

Everything is good where it belongs.

We’re not the first and won’t be the last in this market, but we build it well and with quality. It’s like banks — there are many banks, a few at the top. Why are they at the top? Because they think about people — how to make things convenient, simple, and reliable, so people can solve all their tasks in one place. That’s what I aim for.

We’ve never had those problems, and I hope we won’t. And of course — don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Cursor never stops surprising me — it’s an excellent tool and service, even though it’s not from the crypto world.

I’ve said a lot about this already… More harm than good.

I won’t say yet, but there are two things I’m working through right now. They’re genuinely solid and useful — maybe I’ll ship one by end of year, the second next year. Again, we’ll have to deal with a regulator, and that complicates everything.

Everything is clear, everything works — beautiful, fast, convenient. So much so that you want to recommend it to friends — not because there’s a referral program, but because it’s that good. Like after a great movie at the cinema — you just want to share the experience.