Cogni founder and CEO Archie Ravishankar. Image Credits:<\/strong> Cogni<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The company currently offers core banking services such as deposit accounts for free to its customers through a borrowed bank charter, like many other neobanks, including Chime. It also offers two lifestyle-oriented products \u2014 discounted digital gift cards to popular brands such as Adidas and Sephora that it sources through an aggregator and a feature that calculates a person\u2019s carbon emissions based on their transactions. Ravishankar said the company serves \u201ctens of thousands\u201d of customers in the United States, though he declined to share a specific figure.<\/p>\n

The first crypto-related product it plans to launch is a multi-chain wallet, which Ravishankar estimates will be released in approximately two to three months\u2019 time. The Cogni platform will also offer its users access to an exchange to trade their cryptocurrency through a partnership; Ravishankar said it has narrowed down the contenders for this offering to two major exchanges, but did not share which ones it is considering.<\/p>\n

He noted that the company has not yet decided if the wallet will be non-custodial, meaning users would hold and be able to access their own cryptocurrencies to transact directly. For reference, major crypto exchanges such as Coinbase offer both types of wallets, though the Coinbase default product is a custodial wallet wherein users can trade crypto based on its price movements but cannot directly access the currency they own.<\/p>\n