The crypto market might be filled with anxiety at the moment over the rapidly declining price of Bitcoin and massive selloffs, but there’s at least one new startup in cryptoland that wants to help you give those bitcoins away—just in time for the holidays.
GiveBitcoin.io, which just launched last Thursday, aims to enable people to give the gift of Bitcoin to friends and family on holidays, birthdays and special occasions. The company boasts an impressive list of investors and advisors, including Dr. Saifedean Ammous, economist and author of The Bitcoin Standard; Bitcoin entrepreneur Matt Odell; Coinshares CSO Meltem Demirors; and Funstrat cofounder the aforementioned Tom Lee.
The goal, according to the company, is to create 21 million new “bitcoiners” (get it?) and achieve that thing that bitcoiners continually chase: “mainstream adoption.”
Here’s how it works: Customers who provide bitcoin gifts through GiveBitcoin are required to enforce time locks on those gifts. The minimum time lock is one year, and the maximum is five. Customers can also set specific dates within those timeframes for the locks to end so that the funds become accessible during a birthday, anniversary or holiday. Everyone has their funds stored with Prime Trust, a regulated and insured custodial platform that services US-based customers on crypto exchanges such as Binance, Huobi and Bittrex.
Why a time lock? The idea is to give those BTC recipients an opportunity to better understand how Bitcoin works, according to GiveBitcoin founder Cory Klippsten. While the funds are stored away, the recipients gain access to a 12-part guide that explains the ins and outs of Bitcoin, with new chapters emailed to them on a monthly basis.
Klippsten explained to Decrypt in an interview that the guide is specifically written for people who have little to no crypto experience and includes interviews with the company’s advisors and the latest in crypto research. Getting into crypto for the first time can be very complicated, said Klippsten, and GiveBitcoin aims to help newbies “skip a few steps.”
“It can take years of undirected study to understand Bitcoin well enough to want to store meaningful value in it,” he told Decrypt. “Securely storing BTC requires bitcoin-specific technical knowledge. Meanwhile, new projects, scammers and sketchy media outlets attempt to distract,” said the Missouri School of Journalism grad and self-described “former (failed) local NBC reporter.”
And while it might seem like GiveBitcoin might have picked a bad time to start, er, giving bitcoin, Klippsten isn’t worried.
There’s never been “a better time” to give bitcoin on a risk-adjusted basis, he said. “So much infrastructure and education has come online over the past 18 months. We have an incredible entry point,” said Klippsten.