Ethereum wallet MyCrypto just raised $4 million in its ongoing effort to make its product more user-friendly, the startup announced Thursday.
Led by Polychain Capital, the Series A funding round also saw investments from Boost VC Fund 3 LP, ShapeShift, Ausum Blockchain Fund LP, Mainframe founder Mick Hagen, Coefficient Ventures partner Chance Du, early Dropbox employee Albert Ni and Earn co-founder Lily Liu, according to a press release.
The funds will go toward upgrading MyCrypto’s user experience to help new customers more easily purchase and transact with ethereum, said founder and CEO Taylor Monahan.
Monahan told CoinDesk that one of the biggest issues she sees in the space is the difficulty in actually buying or transacting with cryptocurrencies. To that end, MyCrypto intends to hire developers and designers to target consumers who are beginning to interact with cryptocurrencies for the first time.
She said:
“Right now our team is really all engineers and customer support people and I think we need to build out a team that just advocates for the user more and has a ton of experience in user interface and design. Specifically, I’m looking for experts that don’t have a cryptocurrency background to join the team because their strength is outside the space.”
And part of this push means changing MyCrypto’s target user base, according to Monahan.
“The example to this is the ICO [craze] that took off last year, our user was someone who had ether and wanted to participate in an ICO. That’s our market, that’s the type of person that we targeted back then, that’s the type of person we’re targeting right now and our experience is satisfactory for that user,” she explained.
Going forward, she intends to ask different questions about users.
“When a brand new person comes to our site, what happens, what does the flow look like, what do we recommend they do and how do we really build their confidence up, whether it’s buying cryptocurrency or sending someone some ETH or whatever it is,” she said.
MyCrypto does not have a firm timeline for its development goals yet, but Monahan plans to be ready for the next time interest in cryptocurrency spikes. She pointed at the late 2017 bull run as an example of what that interest might look like, but added that the relatively quiet period in the market has helped in terms of developing a product.
“Right now we’re just building … I think that huge pendulum swing [last year] is why we’re in such a bear market right now, we went way too far … I think that at some point the market is going to realize or see the value that’s being created by all these different products in the space,” she said.
“We are in the perfect position to build this super robust product, we’re large enough that we can build things quickly but we’re small enough that we can pivot quickly, adjust to things quickly,” she concluded.
Ethereum wallet image via Shutterstock