“Try, fail, learn, try again. Repeat until you succeed. Behind every success story, there are hundreds of failures and lessons learned. My story is no different.”
Kris Marszalek is the co-founder and CEO of Crypto.com, a global cryptocurrency exchange platform based in Singapore. Crypto.com offers customers a multitude of services, including an app, a crypto credit card, an exchange, a wallet and an NFT marketplace.
Since 2004, he has co-founded a series of startups in his homeland Poland and Hong Kong. Starline Polska was an award-winning consumer electronics design studio and manufacturing business with offices in Hong Kong, China and Poland. He grew the company from a staff of three to 400 and $81 million in revenue in three years.
In 2009, he co-founded YiYi Hong Kong Limited, an innovative location-based-service mobile application and platform developed with Munich-based Aloqa, which Motorola acquired in 2010. Then came Beecrazy, a leading e-commerce business in Hong Kong, and iBuy Group Limited. In 2014, he founded Ensogo, which is considered the No. 1 online discount retailer in Southeast Asia. In 2016, Marszalek founded Monaco, intending to make digital money more accessible to everyone.
The company launched a wallet in 2017, enabling users to buy, store and exchange cryptocurrencies. In 2018, Monaco was rebranded Crypto.com, which later signed a multi-year deal with the Staples Center in Los Angeles to rename the venue the Crypto.com Arena in November 2021.
Marszalek’s net worth is estimated at $700 million, with the majority of his wealth derived from his ownership of Crypto.com and stakes in several other companies, including Bitcoin Wallet, which Crypto.com acquired in 2018.
In January 2022, Crypto.com lost over $30 million in BTC and ETH in a hacking attack. However, after temporarily halting withdrawals due to suspicious activity reported on several users’ accounts, the company confirmed that no customer funds had been lost.
In May, Marszalek reported reaching a milestone of 50 million customers and 4,000 employees. The same month, the company announced a partnership with Shopify to allow the e-commerce platform’s customers to pay in cryptocurrency.
With the bankruptcies and collapses of major crypto companies in 2022, the cryptocurrency market went through months of a bear market. The downturn also affected Crypto.com, which announced in August that it had to let go of over 2,000 employees globally, approximately 35% of its workforce.
In 2022, Crypto.com obtained significant licenses to provide digital payment services in Singapore, the United Kingdom, Malta, Cyprus and France. The company later announced plans to set up the European headquarters in Paris and invest 150 million euros in the French branch.
In November, Crypto.com appeared as one of the major sponsors at Qatar’s FIFA World Cup, maintaining its role as a leading player of sports sponsorship.
In January, Marszalek’s company signed an eight-year carbon removal agreement with Climeworks to neutralize Crypto.com’s direct carbon emissions. Climeworks is a pioneer in carbon dioxide removal via direct air capture technology. The partnership aims to invest in critical and innovative technology that reduces carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which can be scaled.
Besides advancing sustainability objectives, Marszalek’s 2023 will focus on pushing Crypto.com’s goal to reach 150 million users by 2025 while maintaining its leadership as a regulatory-compliant player in the market.
On Jan. 13, the company made the difficult decision to reduce its global workforce by approximately 20%, in addition to the August cut. Marszalek reported that this was mainly due to market difficulties rather than Crypto.com’s performance. Indeed, the year started with 70 million active customers worldwide, suggesting that the 2025 goal is within comfortable reach.
