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TipLink’s premise is simple: Create a new crypto wallet, deposit funds, and then send it—wallet and all—to a recipient using a link.
Now, that premise is about to be tested at scale.
The company just closed a $6 million seed round, co-led by Multicoin Capital and Sequoia Capital. Circle Ventures, Solana Ventures, and Paxos also participated in the round. Along with the recently raised funds, TipLink is also releasing its API, which developers can use to programmatically generate TipLinks.
Despite, its simplicity, the service has stirred up some users' nerves. In an industry where phishing attacks and malicious links have accounted for millions worth of stolen funds, TipLink CEO and co-founder Ian Krotinsky told Decrypt he’s used to people being a little uneasy about the idea.
Still, he said it’s incredibly unlikely someone will guess the randomly generated link being used to send someone money.
“That is basically mathematically impossible. There's too many combinations for you to guess the links,” Krotinsky told Decrypt during a call last week. “Then there's the question of if I send you a link, what if it's an imperious link? The good thing you have going for you is generally you're not sending money or NFTs to people without having some interaction with them. It’s very hard to just get a message with money.”
Basic Internet hygiene still applies, he said. Don’t click on links to accept money from strangers, or even acquaintances, without first confirming that it’s safe.
Once a user has connected their wallet to TipLink, they can deposit funds and then transfer ownership by sharing a link. Each transaction creates a new wallet, too, so the recipient needn't download a new browser extension or app to use the money. And, if the recipient doesn’t claim the funds, the sender can still reclaim them.
“I don't have to ask you for your Venmo name or your pubkey or your domain name to send or receive crypto,” said Multicoin Capital Partner JR Reed. “While seemingly simple, this is a profound unlock that allows 1-to-many sending and receiving, which is not currently possible in crypto.”
TipLink taps Solana
Krotinsky said he and his co-founder, Aashiq Dheeraj, who worked together at Citadel Securities until last year, have wanted to build TipLink for a while.
“At the time—this was about two and a half years ago—the only sensible place to build this was Ethereum. But the experience would be if I send you $5 and it costs $2. Then I click a button and I sit there for 20 seconds waiting for a link to load,” he said. “It’s like, what are we doing?”
Rather than build their own Layer 1, Krotinsky and Dheeraj decided to wait for someone else to develop a faster, cheaper alternative. Enter: Solana.
TipLink currently runs on Solana and supports all the tokens on the network since early January.
Krotinsky said making TipLink multi-chain is on the team’s roadmap, with priority on any chain that has high throughput and low transaction costs.