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.today that Beta wallet available Easy co-founder and CEO Mike Dougherty told TechCrunch that it is now generally available on iOS and Android 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 VC, Upside, Scribble Ventures, as well as angel investors from traditional social media and web3 groups (former head of Instagram, Novi Products and Engineering, Airbnb including former executives of Twitter, Uber, OpenTable, Eventbrite, etc.
Kevin Swint, co-founder and chief product officer of The Easy Company, told TechCrunch: “The digital wallet space is huge and we believe it is not far from payments, something that can grow rapidly.”
Dougherty says many of web3’s products and services today are too technical for ordinary people to use. “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,” Swint said. “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.
“Protocols serve products, and products serve people,” said Gary Clayton, co-founder of The Easy Company, in a statement. “Web3 applications are incredibly complex from a user perspective, and the vast ecosystem of blockchains and wallets that each requires is dizzying. If we could build an experience that was just as easy and secure to use, more people would come to Web3.”
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 begun 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.”
