It’s not exactly an odd occurrence these days to hear about a mobile payment system netting a big angel investment, or pulling together a group of venture capitalists.
For Plutus, a new mobile payment system out of London that turns to cryptocurrency for its base, it’s not only bringing in a novel proposition, but it’s also accomplished something major, raising $1 million dollars by crowdfunding for its operations.
It took only nine days, reports note, to clear the $1 million mark in crowdfunding, and that’s from better than 1,000 separate investors.
Moreover, in that same nine days, the company signed up over 4,500 new users as early adopters, and will allow users to use bitcoin and Ether, among other cryptocurrencies, in the same way they’d use dollars and pounds at any terminal that offers near-field communications (NFC) access.
Plutus Tap & Pay, which uses the PlutusDEX system, will be making its way to Android devices fairly soon, a development which should please the new early adopters and investors.
Users will be able to use Plutus wallet addresses to convert cryptocurrency to more standard currency, which can then be used accordingly.
Essentially, it’s not that Plutus Tap & Pay requires sellers to accept cryptocurrency, but rather it makes the process of turning cryptocurrency into standard currency, which sellers will accept, much simpler and all from the same platform.
One of the big problems with cryptocurrency in general is that it wasn’t much use beyond investment. Even turning it into cash wasn’t always easy, and very few places took it as payment for goods and services.
We all figured that would have to change at some point, and with this development, it pretty much has. It’s not quite as seamless as we may like, and leaves the underlying problem of “they won’t take bitcoin” untouched, but serving as an intermediary is a smart idea, and one that will likely bring in a lot of new Plutus users.
Cryptocurrency is still a comparatively young phenomenon, so there will be some growing pains as we get more used to this new technology.
Developments like Plutus Tap & Pay make it clear developments are on the way, and the sheer success of its crowdfunding measures should make it clear users want these developments too.