Golden Kitty 2020 winner, Zelf, is back with another colorful product that goes against the grain of traditional Fintech.

Rewinding to last year, founder Elliot Goykhman and a team of makers introduced us to Zelf, which gives users a digital debit card in less than a minute through chat apps like WhatsApp.

"Last year, the Product Hunt community helped us launch a neobank in messengers, bringing over 1 million registered users 🙏," Goykhman noted in last week's launch.

With MetaPass, Zelf is launching into Discord and “positioning itself as the first bank of the metaverse.” We told you to keep an eye out for a lot more products working on infrastructure to power the metaverse — Zelf is one to watch in this space.

With MetaPass, Zelf is not only making its service available in another chat app but is working to tackle the problem of scams within gaming. That's probably necessary for the persistence of the metaverse. We’ve discussed this before — gaming is fraught with fraud. Most newbies won’t want to stick around Decentraland (or any metaverse) if they get ripped off by another person.

As Goykhman explains: “The pandemic accelerated virtualization of our world, boosted gaming industry, NFT, crypto, sprouting play-to-earn games… [but] trading in-game assets outside games is currently a $20 billion gray market fraught with scam and outlawed by game publishers.”

Zelf is partnering with game manufacturers to make transactions more secure, so that when you buy a skin or weapon off of another player, you receive money into your bank account instantly, right within in Discord (or vice versa if you’re the seller). The demo video shares a view of the seamless process. Goykhman also shared with a commenter inquiring about apps beyond Discord that the startup is in the Apple Pay certification phase, and hopes to give users more options by the end of December.

MetaPass could also help power the growth of the budding play-to-earn space. Startups in this space, like Axie Infinity, exploded in popularity over the last year (see: its $152M Series B). In the Philippines, some Axie Infinity players made wages that paid three times better than minimum-wage jobs during the pandemic. In the future, Zelf could help gamers like these instantly cash out their winnings into real money.

The community response so far is 🔥:
“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”
“Cool to see how bridges between #fiat #blockchain and #metaverse are built.”

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