London-based start-up Plutus Tap & Pay has announced that it has raised $1 million in just 9 days of funding for its payment platform which is designed to facilitate contactless payments with bitcoin and ethereum for merchants and customers alike. Over a thousand people participated in the successful and rapid crowdfunding and over 4500 members have signed up to prepare for the launch of Plutus.it.
Filip Martinka, Plutus CCO, said: “The response from our community was swift and tremendous,”
Plutus Tap & Pay is an upcoming Android-only mobile app which lets users make bitcoin and ethereum contactless payments at any existing merchant with a compatible device. This should hopefully remove or reduce a significant barrier to the usage of digital currencies - merchant adoption. Customers no longer have to wait for merchants to accept bitcoin and ethereum directly.
Instead of using an existing exchange and the associated additional risks and fees, or engaging in the high costs it requires to run one, Plutus.it will enable users to trade among themselves as well as enable other exchanges to plug into the network. Traders escrow fiat, users send digital currencies, and the PlutusDEX, the platform’s peer-to-peer exchange, handles the transactions. The crowdfund has secured the development of the PlutusDEX, which will provide native liquidity for the app itself through decentralized smart contracts while offering traders zero fees.
Plutus CEO and Founder, Danial Daychopan commented: “Whenever you make a deposit with Bitcoin or Ethereum, you will also gain a reward in Plutons from the network automatically. We created this model to incentivise users as well as expand our feature-set in the future. Plutons exist autonomously on the Ethereum blockchain and are sufficiently rare to create an advantage for early adopters,”
Everyone who participated in the crowd-sale has recieved a balance of Plutons, payment tokens which are equivalent to bitcoin and ethereum within the Plutus payment network, with the added advantage of faster transactions and zero fees on the Plutus app. Plutus has also attracted former senior business manager Bertrand Dezard from VISA and Braintree / Paypal to join its team as CPO, as well as Tobias Sommer, former VP of various teams at Evercore, who spent 5 years at Morgan Stanley as an analyst, another five years investing into European Buyouts for Arcapita, and now acts as COO at Plutus.
