SatoshiPay just raised €1m to bring nanopayments to the mainstream
BERLIN/LONDON: Very nice, great success.
You may have read on Coindesk that my company SatoshiPay recently raised €640k from London Stock Exchange listed Blue Star Capital (LON:BLU). This was part of a €1m funding round closed earlier today. The round was lead by our early supporter Jim Mellon, with blockchain funds Huiyin Blockchain Venture and Kryptonite 1 (NEX:KR1) co-investing.
I couldn’t be happier to see “old” and “new” finance joining forces to support us at this exciting stage of our company. We are serious about this blockchain thing, and gladly receive part of the funds in bitcoin. (How does one hold so many ‘coins securely? Multi-signature wallet Copay and SatoshiLab’s hardware wallet Trezor to the rescue!)
Jim Mellon already took part in our funding round last year through the Fast Forward Innovations fund, which he co-founded. In his own words:
I am delighted to have been an early, and now follow-on investor in such an exciting company. I am fully expecting great things from Meinhard and the team!
— Jim Mellon
Jim has been an avid supporter along our way and I would like to personally thank him for renewing his trust in SatoshiPay and its vision of a world in which nanopayments allow transparent value transfer between any internet connected device.
Record needle scratch. Nanopayments?
Amounts of €10 or less are generally considered a micropayment. We’ve built a system that allows to transfer amounts a thousand times smaller: a few cents or less. Hence we prefer to use the term “nanopayments”. More on the subject in my post Nanopayments, Everywhere on the Web.
Isn’t SatoshiPay just an alternative to content “paywalls”?
Yes and no. In 2016 we focussed on launching and improving our website widget, which allows consumers to pay small amounts for increments of content like a news article or an individual image, across websites. We have also recently added support for audio/video and file downloads.
This year’s focus is to make our website widget more compatible to a mass market audience by adding more payment methods like credit cards and other instant payments for topping up credit. This way consumers will not even realise Bitcoin/Blockchain technology is used in the background and can simply enjoy a frictionless web content payment experience.
Together with Visa and Wirecard, we already explored making our system more accessible to people that don’t hold bitcoins. We are very pleased with the results of this proof-of-concept project and all three partners learned a lot about linking blockchain-based payments to legacy payment networks during the last couple of months.
Localising our user interface will allow us to work with more publishers of web content and digital goods worldwide and to grow our network of accepting websites far beyond the Bitcoin niche.
I’m especially looking forward to our upcoming website-to-user payments, enabling website owners to push small amounts of value to their readers, for example for filling out a survey, sharing some private data or fulfilling a small task.
Now that we have build our nanopayment platform, we will also begin to use it for other things than web content, for example machine-to-machine payments in the Internet of Things and in closed-loop systems like apps and games. But more on that later…
Thanks
I’d like to thank our friends at SCC for brokering a large portion of this investment round and our previous investors Coinsilium (NEX:COIN) and Axel Springer’s Plug & Play for their continued support.
But none of this would have been possible without a strong core. I want to thank the current SatoshiPay team, who continue to drive the company forward, as well as everyone involved in getting us to where we are now: Alex, Julia, Henning, Kilian, Levin, Erasmus, René, Florian, Moritz, Ruben, János, Nicolas, Eddy, Malcolm, Gavin, Michael, Rupert, Jeremy, Hewie, Tony, Anthony, the Visa Europe Collab crew, their counterparts at Wirecard and of course my mum Gerda.
Also I’d like to note that with my long respected friend and former co-founder Alexander Wilke joining SatoshiPay as Chief Operations Officer in October 2016, it became a lot easier to get this funding round going and to prepare SatoshiPay for the growth push we are expecting this year. Welcome aboard, Alex!
Let me finish by giving you a snapshot of our current traction: in 2016, through organic growth alone, nearly 30,000 user wallets were created and over 300 publishers from all around the world signed up to our platform.
We’ve got an exciting year ahead! Follow us on Twitter @SatoshiPay to stay up to date with the latest developments.
Meinhard Benn
Chief Satoshi Counter @ SatoshiPay
