ChangeTip, the viral social media tipping platform, raised $3.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Bitcoin investment firm Pantera Capital, with participation from DCG, CryptoCurrency Partners, Bold Star Ventures, and others.
As mentioned in Pantera Capital’s press release, the latest round of funding will be allocated towards bettering the platform’s infrastructure by focusing on “product enhancement, platform engineering development, and user acquisition.”
Already a craze on leading social media channels, ChangeTip claims to have brought over 50,000 users to the Bitcoin ecosystem. In the last few months, the platform has noticed a substantial increase in user activity – mostly from Reddit, Twitter, GitHub and YouTube – which indicates its growing popularity among the new and veteran Bitcoiners.
In a statement published in the same press release, ChangeTip founder and CEO Nick Sullivan spoke about the growing momentum of tipping on the internet, basically to express appreciation with small monetary or other digital gifts. “With ChangeTip, a million users can tip $0.01 and the content creator can collect his $10,000, an impossibility in a legacy payments world,” he added.
Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead shared Sullivan’s view on the growing tipping culture on the internet, and further emphasized how this practice could bring new users to Bitcoin. “Bitcoin is currently at an inflection point in terms of adoption and global acceptance, after maturing significantly over the past year,” he said. “We have partnered with ChangeTip because the company is uniquely positioned as a cross-channel platform that fluidly on-boards highly-engaged consumers and businesses into the bitcoin ecosystem.”
Do you think tipping apps could seriously play a major role in boosting the Bitcoin ecosystem? Please provide your comments below.