The Easy Company has raised $14.2 million in a seed round and launched its “social” crypto wallet to help onboard more mainstream audiences, he shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
Easy aims to combine user-selected profiles with engaging social features so that people can search, navigate and discover the world of web3 on their own. Today, your beta wallet is available to the public on iOS and Android after completing a 30-day private testing phase, Mike Dougherty, Easy’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
“We are very focused on building the consumer layer,” Dougherty said. “We think about the next chapter of web3 by widespread adoption and usability.”
The funding round included Lobby Capital, Relay Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Tapestry VC, Upside, and Scribble Ventures, as well as angel investors from traditional social media and web3 groups such as former heads of Instagram, Novi product and engineering, and former Airbnb executives, Twitter, Uber, OpenTable and Eventbrite, among others.
“We want to offer the world a new way to interact with web3, but also a new digital wallet,” Kevin Swint, co-founder and chief product officer of The Easy Company, told TechCrunch. “We think the digital wallet space is huge and it hasn’t moved away from payments and it’s something we can grow into quickly.”
Many of today’s web3 products and services are too technical for the layperson to use, Dougherty said. “If you look at the products and experiences on web3, they might be too technical and built by and for technical users. … We are changing this to create a consumer product rather than a tool, which leads to different design decisions.”
The platform, which was demonstrated to TechCrunch over Zoom, had a similar layout to social media apps like Instagram through elements like the NFT showcase, where users can swipe to see both their own NFTs and people’s NFTs. they “watch,” like Instagram stories. .
The similarity was not an accident either, Swint said. “We have a couple of key advisors from Instagram and we see ourselves as an Instagram-like experience for NFTs in a wallet.”
While there are some traditional media elements in the Easy wallet, it’s “an adoption of web3 and bringing some of web2 into that, rather than bringing web3 back to web2,” Swint noted. “Innovation around web3 is fundamental to what we do. It is a decentralized wallet; much of the wallet code is open source and we want to honor the web3 community to move the space forward.”
The wallet also allows users to link their social identity from other sites and curate their profiles with their own NFTs from multiple wallet accounts and blockchains. There’s a rating system called Signal, which allows users to review anything from NFT collections to markets and platforms; it also allows the community to flag potential fraud in an effort to increase security. Separately, there’s a search feature that allows users to search for terms like “boring” to see both members with that phrase in their name and collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Easy was designed with cross-chain functionality, and currently supports Ethereum and Polygon NFT, with plans for more blockchains in the future, Swint noted.
“Protocols serve products and products serve people,” Gary Clayton, co-founder of The Easy Company, said in a statement. “Web3 applications are incredibly complex from a user perspective, and the vast ecosystem of blockchains and the wallets required for each is dizzying. If we create experiences that make using Web3 as easy and safe as today’s consumer web designs, more users will come to Web3.”
In the app, people can also send cryptocurrency and tokens to real profiles and usernames, rather than a random variation of numbers and letters (which often make up the crypto wallet address), Swint said.
“We started to see the wallet as something very strategic. The wallet is a personal companion that is with you on your journey at every step. The wallet itself can do so much more to help us navigate, connect and keep us safe,” Dougherty said. “We built Easy to be the wallet we wanted to use on day one on web3.”
The capital will be used to continue building the social product, but also to expand blockchain support, Dougherty said. “We’re going to work hard to live up to the ‘easy’ vision and make web3 as easy as we’re used to in web2.”
