The Easy Company has raised $14.2M in a seed funding round to build a new crypto wallet to resonate with the digital lifestyle of today’s web3 users.
The seed funding round was led by Lobby Capital with participation from Relay Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Tapestry VC, Upside Partnership and Scribble Ventures. Experienced angel investors from social and Web3 also joined the round, including former heads of Instagram and Novi product and engineering, and former executives from Airbnb, Twitter, Uber, OpenTable, Eventbrite and others.
David Hornik, Partner at the Lead Investor Lobby Capital, pointed out that most Web3 applications are clunky and complex. Web3 will transform many aspects of our digital lives, but it will never reach its full potential unless developers start building applications for everyday users.
“When we first met with the team, we were blown away by the idea that navigating Web3 applications could be easy, beautifully designed, fun and safe all at once—and the product lived up to its promise. We’re thrilled to partner with The Easy Company to bring Web3 to the mass consumer market,” David added.
Designed and built by consumer web and mobile veterans from Airbnb, Disney, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nuance, and iHeartMedia, Easy is a new approach to wallet design, with a focus on user experience, safety, and fun.
Easy Beta Launch
The company also announced beta release of Easy social wallet. Designed with full cross-chain functionality, Easy combines beautiful, user-curated profiles with engaging social discovery features to help users navigate and discover the vibrant world of Web3. Easy is also introducing a first-of-its-kind community-sourced rating system, Signal, to protect users from scams and risks pervasive in Web3.
Mike Dougherty, CEO and co-founder, The Easy Company, said: “Web3 is poised to fundamentally transform the internet as we know it. But to continue pushing innovation, new Web3 products have to support the needs of mainstream web users—and they need to be safe.”
“The current generation of wallets are highly technical, complex, stressful to use, and fragment users across separate accounts and blockchains. This opens the door to scams and can lead to costly errors. The lack of social and community features for discovery also make today’s wallets one-dimensional,” Mike added.
Easy Wallet: Features and benefits
Easy Wallet offers following features and benefits.
- Easy enables users to curate their personal profiles with their own beautiful NFTs and digital art from multiple wallet accounts and blockchains, personalizing the wallet experience and creating a unified, verified social identity. Users can browse other profiles, and easily send crypto and tokens to those profiles.
- Easy’s community feed enables users to discover in real-time what is happening on Web3 across multiple blockchains. A blockchain-based interest graph helps users see what’s new and trending, follow their friends and favorite communities, react and comment real-time, and boost what they find interesting to share with friends.
- Easy’s community-sourced rating system, Signal, enables users to rate and flag risky transactions and services, then surfaces this Signal data at the moment users need it most—when they connect and transact. Signal helps Easy users understand better what they are transacting with and stay safe.
- Easy’s cross-chain wallet enables users to seamlessly send and receive cryptocurrency and tokens, as well as sign and transact with Web3 applications.
“Web3 and blockchain technologies will change the way we all use the internet. A token internet is emerging, where tokens are a powerful new primitive for application design, interaction models, identity, community building, productization, and monetization,” said Kevin Swint, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, The Easy Company.
Kevin, however, believes that the overall user experience remains too complex and primitive for wide-scale adoption.
According to Kevin, Easy intends to address these gaps and move from infrastructure tools to consumer products, to unlock the benefits of Web3 for everyone.
“Protocols serve products and products serve people. Web3 applications are incredibly complex from a user perspective, and the vast ecosystem of blockchains and required wallets for each is dizzying,” said Gary Clayton, co-founder, The Easy Company.
“If we build experiences that make using Web3 as easy and safe as current consumer web designs, more users will come to Web3. Easy emphasizes community because our mission is to make Web3 accessible for all,” Gary added.
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