TipLink, a startup building technology that allows users to send crypto and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) with a link, has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital and Multicoin Capital. The announcement comes as infrastructure projects have been able to partially stave off the effects of crypto winter on fundraising.
TipLink enables users to send crypto through a link that also acts as the wallet, meaning the user doesn’t need to know anything about crypto to receive the assets. Those assets can then be withdrawn to an existing crypto wallet or, eventually, to their financial institution. Companies can utilize TipLink to host giveaways using crypto without asking for the public keys of user wallets and can give away tokens at events using a scannable QR code. TipLink offers an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to create TipLinks for free and add any asset.
"There's still a tremendous amount of friction in crypto that holds back mainstream adoption. It's unreasonable to ask the general population to set up a 12- or 24-word seed phrase wallet, much less a hardware wallet, just to send a dollar or receive a commemorative NFT,” said TipLink founder and CEO Ian Krotinsky in the press release. “TipLink solves one of the biggest problems in crypto: how to send digital assets in a frictionless way."
Investors in the round also included Asymmetric, Big Brain Ventures, Circle Ventures, Karatage, Monke Ventures, Paxos, and Solana Ventures, among others.
“As people who live and breathe crypto every day, we take for granted that users know what public and private keys are, how hot wallets and seed phrases work, how to secure assets, how to transfer NFTs, etc,” wrote Multicoin Capital principal Spencer Applebaum and partner John Robert Reed in a blog post detailing the TipLink investment. “Wallets based on multi-party computation (MPC) such as Web3Auth and mobile apps with native social recovery have made strides in reducing barriers to entry. But in addition to Web3Auth and mobile wallets, we need tools designed for mainstream users that know absolutely nothing about crypto.”
