East Ventures Engages in Pebble Funding, Revolutionizing Digital Wallet Business Model Through Blockchain

Today (24/5) East Ventures announced its involvement in the seed funding of Pebble, a startup fintech payments based in New York. This investment round follows the debut of Pebble's products after joining the Y Combinator acceleration program.

In addition to East Ventures, the funding of $6,2 million or equivalent to 91 billion Rupiah was also supported by Y Combinator, Lightshed Ventures, LD Capital, Soma Capital, Cadenza Capital, Eniac Ventures, and Global Founders Capital. A number of individual investors were also involved, among them Odell Beckham Jr. (NFL superstar), Matthew Bellamy (vocalist for Muse), Richard Ma (CEO of Quantstamp), and Leore Avidar (CEO of Alt).

Pebble developed a -based digital wallet application blockchain, enabling users to save, spend and send money efficiently. Even through certain mechanisms, users can get benefits in the form of credit of a certain value for the nominal or transactions that occur in the application.

“Pebble was founded to introduce a new standard in personal finance. Through the Pebble digital wallet, users can earn 5% profit from annual yield percentage or Annual Percentage Yield Rewards of their money, as well as cashback by 5% unlimited at 55 merchant partners like Amazon, Domino's, AirBnB, Adidas, and many more," said Pebble Co-founder & CTO Sahil Phadnis.

In addition, they have collaborated with Mastercard to release a debit card for each of its users.

With a vision to empower as many people financially as possible, Pebble will use the fresh funds raised to drive its expansion into global markets. Pebble plans to release its app in Southeast Asia by the end of 2022.

Utilization blockchain in the application system

In its business process, when a user deposits money into the app, Pebble converts it into a -based currency blockchain with nominal US$ (stablecoin) called USDC (US dollar-denominated blockchain-based currency). Then, they will lend it to an officially registered financial institution.

USDC technology is considered to be able to empower the fastest and cheapest global transactions, so that many major financial institutions in the world are willing to pay more to access stablecoin. All of these advantages are accessible to users without having to understand the complexities of cryptocurrencies.

Through Pebble website, users can collect currency open rewards (named “Pebbles”) which aims to facilitate the introduction of the economy blockchain for users who do not understand crypto. Basically Pebbles doesn't have any value or function at the moment; but the currency will be key to aligning the incentives of teams, investors, partners, merchant, and users to build a new global economy on blockchain — together.

Although the Pebble app is currently only available in the United States, Pebble Co-founder & CEO Aaron Bai said, “The Pebble community has brought together people around the world who are passionate about building a global standard financial system in the world. blockchain. "

The hard task of building trust

For founder Pebble believes that mass adoption of technology blockchain will happen if users can see the benefits before judging crypto based on stereotypes.

According to our analysis, with several events afflicting the global financial ecosystem in recent times --- including the decline in the value of several stablecoin The impact of the crisis which gives the impression that the guarantee of value stability has failed to be proven --- has become one of the toughest jobs for players like Pebble to build trust in the public. Moreover, the main base of their service is using stablecoin.

Nevertheless, the concept is interesting. Previous platform crypto-earn else wraps such a service through an app wealthtech or investment, with the concept of the user putting a certain amount of crypto in advance to be replayed. Meanwhile, what Pebble does is more to replace user habits with digital wallets that are used daily --- which indirectly helps promote blockchain to a wider audience.