Wanted to share a few details about what we're building at Caliber (https://runCaliber.com, https://twitter.com/runCaliber).

I have always been annoyed at fees and latency to go in between a bank account and an exchange. This is particularly annoying when trying to hold as few dollars as possible at any given time, but I suspect that even for the average person, the friction between bank and exchange slows them down from getting into Bitcoin. Caliber is fixing this with two key features: "zero fee" trading and bidirectional instant ACH with continuous bank-account transaction monitoring. This allows us to replace dollars and sell bitcoin just-in-time, and execute this automatically without the user needing to manually move dollars just before making a fiat transaction. I like to think about it as making bitcoin move over fiat rails. It allows the user to unilaterally decide the money they want to use at all time such that the financial choices merchants they wish to interact with has the minimum possible impact on them. The low fees are important since spending bitcoin means the fees get multiplied by 2. This just in time well be set as a "get on X" feature where you can set a target value of dollars in a bank account such that bitcoin buying and selling occurs automatically to achieve that. Setting X to 0 will be possible with some constraints that we will work to eliminate over time (more details on this will be shared when we launch).

We will also be building accounting tools based on minimizing taxes by considering both 1 year time for long term gains and automatically matching lots so that you are selling highest in first (nothing about IRS accounting guidelines say "lots" have to be UTXOs! we can define lots as an accounting fiction, even including bitcoin purchased elsewhere off our exchange). There will also be automation options for tax-loss harvesting. What you need to realize is that when you spend bitcoin, any capital gains are applied only to the gain, not to the total amount, and since the tax rate is under 100%, you actually end up with more bitcoin when you hold fewer dollars. For some reason people get very emotional an incapable of arithmetic when this is mentioned -- betting on more and more people realizing they are wrong on this is similar to betting that nocoiners will eventually get into bitcoin. The volatility FUD is also nonsensical, but not going to get into that now.

Another nice aspect of this is that despite the logical truth that saving is using, many people will ask "how can I use it?" in reference to spending. Rather than having to explain why they are asking the wrong question and have the wrong mental models, there can now be a simple answer, which will be "you can use it today, it is universally accepts (when you use bitcoin-over-fiat-payment-rail products)". I tried to take this approach with someone in the context of a PayWithMoon card, but any amount of complexity is too much imo.

I have also always hated how marked up seed plates are (my background is materials engineer). In order to have no fees, we will have a monthly subscription fee (which will work out to a very low fee, low tens of basis points, if that), which will include access to a hardware store where we sell basic bitcoin hardware with small margins. Maybe a 10-pack of seed plates for $61.5. We'll also get some micro PCs for nodes with some of the new Jasper Lake Intel chips, which will be a lot better than the Pi machines, and still be priced lower. I'd also like to add pre-built open source hardware wallets, where they are shipped without the firmware installed to force the user to not trust us on firmware. If we can become a Pi Zero authorized reseller, than we can help ensure there is enough stock available for SeedSigners.

Fees will be 0.1% based on the exchange we are working with, which actually undercuts Strike's no-fee 0.2-0.3% spread. But we will also allow large transaction volumes, which means we will even be undercutting major exchanges used by institutions, and well under the 1% fees charged by Swan and River (though we won't do the hand-holding thing they do). Our goal is to become the Schelling point of exchanges. We will not pay people to refer their friends to our exchange -- we will simply have such a compelling offering it will cost them their reputation to say anything other than Caliber.

If that isn't true, we are doing something wrong. Of course, that doesn't take into account that getting non-KYC is also important -- since our model is subscription rather than volume driven, our incentives better align with our customers, and we can encourage them to stack non-KYC somewhere else without it hurting our business.

Current ETA is early September beta launch. Beta launch will likely not include 100% of the features here.

Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback/suggestions if anyone has any.

Oh, and we are also building a new type of OTC derivatives contract tool that will push corporations into putting money from their balance sheet into bitcoin before they would otherwise want to acquire bitcoin, and do so in a way that that bitcoin goes to the employees rather than shareholders. The first bitcoin standard of value product (critical tech for the years preceding hyperbitcoinization): https://contracts.runcaliber.com