Andrés on what makes Monerujo special

Monerujo is a Monero wallet that is truly driven by the community. It is developed by a group of friends. Andrés is one of them.

What makes Monerujo special?

Monerujo is indeed special. It's truly a passion project, built by a few Monero believers in their free time which even became friends. We believe private, self-custodied money is something worth having in the world, and without the proper tools to interact with it, it'll fail. Monerujo is also special because its design decisions are not profit-driven, we're not a company nor do we plan to be one. We also try as best as we can to strike a balance between security and ease of use, but if we fail, we rather fail in friendliness and keep everyone's hard earned moneroj safe.

As you are not a company: How does your funding model work?

Most of our funding comes from the donations of our users. Since the beginning we have a public XMR address and we provide the view keys so the users can see how much we receive. It's a great use case for the optional transparency Monero offers. We also get a small commision on the exchanges done inside the app, of course with no extra cost to the user.

Since last year we implemented a very interesting twist to donations, with the Monerujo Funding system. It's a website where you can see all open ideas for new features that the team considers viable and desirable, and anyone can donate to a specific one to get it funded (and worked on) first. It's based on plowsof's work and u/ twisted_turtles's design for https://monerochan.art, with our own modifications on top of it. You can check it our at http://funding.monerujo.app. We also added NFTs to it, because you can never have enough Günthers.

That means the community can influence the direction you are going in, right?

Yes! It's not a 100% fixed rule but we do work first on features that have been funded first. But we also take into account the number of individual donations as well. Everything can be gamed, of course, but it may be a good indicator of interest for a specific development coming from people that are not Monero whales, so to speak. And we love that. We don't get data from our users so without the funding signal or the comments, we're pretty much designing in the dark.

What is up with the nifty Günthers? That sounds like a German first name.

Günter is the name of Monerujo's official mascot, which in true Monero fashion of course we have no way to know if that's his real name. As a fun twist for the funding idea, we made artisanal images of Günthers from different time periods in different art styles, and period clothing. Privacy advocates existed through the ages and we wanted to pay homage to that, the anonymous humans that came before us. They're awarded to all contributors above the 1 XMR threshold.

What was the first project that you funded through this method? was it the monerujo sidekick?

The first feature to be funded was a smaller one, the support for .onion Tor nodes, which allows you to keep the fact that you're even using something Monero-related to yourself.

Why is monerujo called monerujo? It sounds Spanish.

It's actually Esperanto, like Monero's name itself. Monero means "coin" and Monerujo "coin wallet". It comes from an old Reddit thread by u/dnale0r.

Is there a special connection between monerujo and the Spanish speaking Monero community?

So there's no naming connection, but sadly, many Spanish-speaking countries have a history of bad currency policies and overall distrust of institutions, mixed with concerns for personal safety, therefore a preference for cash. So there's not a big leap for people to make to understand Monero's value. Curiously, I think it also happens in Germany, where there's a big privacy and cash culture, for historic reasons.

You are also active in the Spanish community, right? I saw you on the El Monero Channel. Do you have an idea on how we can increase the synergy between the Spanish speaking and the English speaking Monero community? It seems like information flows from English to Spanish, but there is not much in the other direction. It would be interesting to have some English content on what goes on in the Spanish part of Moneroland.

Yes, I try to be as active as I can. I was actually one of the two hosts of El Monero podcast, which was the origin of that channel. I sincerely have no good answer for that. Me and a few more enthusiasts try to create original Spanish content, but the overall crypto discussion is almost entirely in English, so the instances of original Spanish materials that need to cross over are very few. I believe that if the adoption grows, with the appearance of local in-person meetups, different use cases and ideas will pop up. Until then, I think it'll keep flowing from English to Spanish and not the other way around.

Okay great! thank you very much for your time! Where can people find out more about you and the Monerujo project?

I'm @anhdres everywhere, Twitter, Reddit, Matrix, Mastodon, etc. Don't hesitate to reach out, best things in life come from interacting with others. Monerujo is developed by m2049r, baltsar, and me. You can find out more at https://monerujo.io or by following us at @monerujowallet . There's also an unofficial, user run telegram group at https://t.me/monerujounderground where you can talk with other Günthers. Thank you very much for your interest and questions!