Easy Company has raised $14.2 million in a seed round and has exclusively shared with TechCrunch that it will launch a “social” crypto wallet to help reach a wider mainstream audience.
Easy aims to combine user-curated profiles with engaging social features to help people search, navigate and discover the web3 world on their own. Easy co-founder and CEO Mike Dougherty told TechCrunch that the beta wallet is now generally available on iOS and Android today after completing a 30-day private testing phase.
“We are very focused on building our consumer base,” said Dougherty. “By mainstream adoption and ease of use, we thought of the next chapter for web3.”
The funding round includes Lobby Capital, Relay Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Tapestry, Upside, Scribble, as well as angel investors from traditional social media and the web3 group (Instagram, former head of product and engineering at Novi, Airbnb, Twitter , Uber, OpenTable, Eventbrite, etc.
Kevin Swint, co-founder and chief product officer at The Easy Company, told TechCrunch: “The digital wallet space is huge, and we believe it has not moved away from payments, something that can grow rapidly.”
Many of today’s web3 products and services are too technical for ordinary people to use, Dougherty said. “When you look at the web3 products and experiences, they can be too technical, built by tech users, for tech users. We’re shifting to building products and this leads to different design decisions.”
The platform, which was demonstrated to TechCrunch via Zoom, had a layout similar to social media apps like Instagram via elements such as NFT showcases. Users can swipe to see both their own NFTs of hers or those of people “watching” like Instagram stories. .
The similarities were no coincidence either, Swint said. “We had some key advisors from Instagram and thought it would be an Instagram-like experience for NFTs in Wallet.”
Easy’s wallet has some traditional media elements, but it’s “not taking web3 back to web2, but embracing web3 and bringing some of web2 into it,” said Swint. “Innovation around web3 is at the core of what we do.
The wallet also allows users to link their social identities from other sites and curate their profiles with their NFTs from multiple wallet accounts and blockchains. She has a rating system called Signal where users can review everything from her NFT collections to marketplaces and platforms. It also allows the community to flag potential scams for added safety. Separately, there is a search function that allows users to search for terms such as “boring” to display both members with that phrase in their name and collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Swint said Easy was designed with cross-chain capabilities and is currently compatible with Ethereum and Polygon NFTs, with plans to have more blockchains in the future.
Swint said the app can also send cryptocurrencies and tokens to profiles and real usernames (which often make up the addresses of cryptocurrency wallets), rather than randomizing numbers and letters. ).
“We have started to see wallets as very strategic. They are your personal companions that are with you every step of your journey. We can do a lot more to stay connected and secure,” said Dougherty. “We built Easy to be the wallet we wanted to use in the first days of web3.”
Dougherty said the funds will not only be used to continue building the social product, but also to expand support for blockchain. “We are working hard to bring our vision of ‘easy’ to life and make web3 as easy to create as we are used to with web2.”
