Ken Olling likes to break boundaries. He grew up in a middle-class suburb in Los Angeles, but when he was turned down for a college place in the best car design school in the world, he decided to up sticks and head out to Japan.
“I had a choice: listen to the expert across the table or tell him to go to hell.”
He lived in Tokyo from age 18 until age 23 during the 80s. This was the economic boom for Japan, the Asian Tiger, and living during the economic bubble really defined his experiences in outrageous and exotic ways. It was a time that also defined his ideas of collecting experiences to develop a fearless approach to life.
“I like to attack things head on as a result, which has helped my life as an entrepreneur – being kind of thick headed and obstinate helps this life.”
Funnily enough, in a very satisfying turn of events, Olling returned as a guest lecturer to the same car design school seven years later. He recalls the tense, uncomfortable silence at lunch that greeted his recollection of being told he had no talent or skill as a teenager. It’s not a nasty recollection but a smug one. The uncomfortable silence lasted about 30 seconds and he thoroughly enjoyed it.
Olling’s migration to Japan during the boom and its domination of global automobile production led him to becoming a talented automobile designer. Over time, he understood that experience is the fuel of good design. His exposure to the radially different culture in Tokyo helped him to learn how to communicate more effectively but it also quickly migrated his love of cars into a love of type.
“I’m a typographer in the world of graphic design, which I’ve been doing both for 25 years now.”
Olling moved back to his native America in ’93. His career in graphic design was traditional and mechanical and pre technology. Then he stumbled into computers, notably into the Mac world, and his enthusiasm for the Mac superseded his graphical design skills. His next job was more about his enthusiasm for IT than graphics – a trend which was to continue to morph until he became a founder of a blockchain crypto project. That’s still a bit of a stretch, so what else pushed him into finance, notably crypto finance.
A segue into IT was accompanied by the arrival of the internet in ’94 and ’95.
“To be honest, the internet set me on fire. I literally became an internet fanatic, which got me fired from my nominally graphics position as all I wanted to do was get people signed up to the internet.”
In a slight deviation, and I’m still not sure how we got here, Olling tried to set up a banking license in Malta. He explains this adoption of finance as coming from his perspective of working for financial companies.
“I think the role of a designer is to synthesis whatever business I was working in – so I became an expert in green energy, white goods, manufacturing etc. I was also aware that my graphics skills were becoming a commodity and saw my pension was going to be worth nothing when I retired, so I started to look at different types of investment instruments.”
That in turn led him to sovereign debt – how could it not – and to produce a financial model for an investment bank using sovereign debt. However, he came up against many impediments in the traditional financial world. He was basically heart sick of the bureaucrats and the red tape.
“So difficult, so condescending. The financial ecosystem has evolved to serve high net worth individuals in large corporations. Everything, and everyone else, is basically cannon fodder.”
At the same time, he witnessed the rise of ICOs in the crypto world in 2018 and while most of them ended up as scams, he saw real function in those projects flirting with DeFi. His son also was invested in this space and Olling began to understand it was more than just speculation – he could see value clearly.
“Then the whole GameStop fiasco happened in 2020 and I finally understood what Bitcoin could mean.”
It wasn’t the little people ‘aping’ into GameStop that shook him, but the fact that the hedge funds and major exchanges reacted and froze assets without permission of the underlying owners.
“That was the aha moment for me. With Bitcoin everything is math. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are or how many guns you have pointed at anyone or even how many missiles you have, you can’t change Bitcoin, you can’t turn it off, and you have no control over it.
“it’s math: it’s brutal and ruthless but it treats everyone equally.”
Next stop on the Olling journey, we can’t even call it a rabbit hole as yet as he was definitely above ground, was a regular poker game with friends. Every Saturday night it was his custom to play with friends, many of whom had been investing money in crypto on a monthly basis since 2019. They would often talk about their investments and how they had grown, some into multimillion dollar portfolios, but when they all went out to dinner, Olling was the most liquid person in the room.
“They were worth millions but they didn’t have the cash to buy a beer. I was frankly tired of buying dinner for my rich friends.
“This was a problem to be solved.”
Olling was also not convinced by the prominent centralized DeFi platforms such as Celcius or BlockFi – a prescient move as it happens. At another poker night, one of his friends said there were only two ways to make money in crypto. His friend told him to hodl or build.
“I didn’t have any crypto, so I knew I had to build.”
Within a month, he’d started building Meld.
Meld began life as a lending and borrowing protocol. It was predicated on a simple idea that someone could take their crypto asset, borrow against it and receive fiat. The loan could be used to buy a car, to get married, whatever you needed.
“But unlike something like Celsius, it was all self-custody – you control your own keys.”
Although Olling began building Meld before the collapse of centralized CeFi in 2023, he was adamant that nothing was to be ‘black box’ and that everything had to be transparent.
Meld is now a Layer 1 blockchain; it’s effectively an on-chain bank. Users can keep their money on the blockchain as a bank and with a Meld account, they can borrow or lend against their assets. Meld has integrated fiat payment rails (Olling decided against getting a banking license) so that users can access their fund like a regular fiat account. After an initial banking partner got cold feet, Olling decided to cover his bets and now has a number of banking partners providing fiat services and widespread coverage in case one partner fails, for whatever reason.
Back in 2021 Olling undertook two different methods of fundraising. The first was a token sale but based on an ISPO or “initial stake pool offering”. This was designed to democratize investment and benefit retail investors over large corporations or VCs.
The mechanics of the ISPO allows people to invest in the platform without actually paying Meld anything – the investors keep their own funds and earn block rewards for staking. The only difference is that the investors must stake for a certain period, in Meld’s case it was for five months. This raise generated $18 million from 60,000 people – ticking the funds box as well as the retail approach.
“In fact, when we launched, we got $100 million staked in the first 24 hours and at the peak we had $1.3 billion staked.”
This method is much healthier according to Olling as Meld had to engage with the community over a longer period and people had a better sense of the project as a result.
As it was Olling’s first built in crypto he had to start his community from scratch which cost blood, sweat and tears, or about 70 AMAs in the first 30 days.
“We spoke with anyone that was willing to speak with us. We slowly shared what we were doing and how we were doing it. And it just slowly built and built a
nd built.”
In 2022, Meld launched with six competitors, and the year ended with none.
“All those centralized platforms imploded on themselves. For us, it truly was a DeFi moment and we knew we were on the right track.”
At the start of 2023, Meld the blockchain was launched, then the wallet, then staking and soon the lending and borrowing protocol. The mobile app is in Beta, there is bridging to other blockchains – currently Ethereum, Avalanche, Cardano and Meld.
Olling is confident in Meld. He sees the hurt from the other centralized platforms and tells people to ‘Come at me’ and ask the hardest questions. People’s money is on chain. It’s not audited every year, it’s visible all the time and audited every hour by 1000s of people around the world.
“it’s not always perfect and it’s hard being always accountable to a community, but that is the vision of Satoshi. Basing a financial system on blockchain and math is much better than basing it on humans – it’s harder but it’s much better. Blockchain does not get influenced by greed.
“Being transparent is brutal but it’s also very healthy.”
That’s a lot of building just to avoid paying for his poker friends’ dinners.
