Runa (formerly WeGift) launches to empower individuals and businesses to unlock digital value
Runa, formerly known as WeGift, today announced its launch as a digital value infrastructure that enables individuals and businesses to pay and get paid by anyone, anywhere, instantly. Runa’s first-of-its-kind payment rail unlocks all forms of digital value – from shares and gift cards to cryptocurrencies and NFTs – and seamlessly facilitates B2C payments and C2B payments regardless of the asset category used. Runa’s infrastructure enables instant B2C global payments free of charge for sender and receiver.
The digital currency and digital payments markets are expected to become a multi-trillion dollar industry over the next decade, but they remain largely fragmented and not integrated into legacy payment systems. Sending, receiving and storing digital value has become routine, and individuals are now sitting on billions of dollars in the form of gift cards, airline miles, reward points and more. Although this digital value can be easily stored, it cannot be easily exchanged as desired: companies often do not accept it, so individuals struggle to use it. By increasing the liquidity of digital assets, Runa creates a win-win result for both businesses and consumers. Businesses can adapt to an increasingly mainstream part of the economy, such as using digital value for bulk payments, while consumers can use the value they’ve received however they want, buying the products they want, when they want them.
“Today, it would be unthinkable for any business not to accept credit card payments,” said Aron Alexander, CEO and founder, Runa. “Soon, it will be equally unthinkable for the same business not to issue or accept any form of digital value. With Runa’s infrastructure in place, there is no need for one of these payment methods to be more complex than the other. I’m excited to see the impact Runa will have as a means of transforming the way people use, exchange and create digital value.”
Since its establishment in 2016, Runa has already helped users unlock and spend over $1.1 billion in digital value in the form of gift cards, sending over 22.5 million gift cards across 30 countries and 18 currencies, through partnerships with over 1,300 businesses. The closed-loop prepaid and stored value ecosystem used to process gift cards is a proven example of how new forms of digital assets can be used for Point-Of-Sale or online payments, a model that can be replicated with other forms of digital assets.
Now Runa’s platform is expanding its capabilities to form an all-encompassing digital payment network for all categories of digital assets that will include all of the company’s existing functionalities. The Runa infrastructure can integrate all forms of digital assets, including prepaid and token currency, cryptocurrencies, web3 tokenized assets (NFT), air miles, shares, subscriptions and more. These digital asset categories are currently underserved by the payments industry, and Runa complements established banking and credit card networks to create a comprehensive payment infrastructure capable of transferring value quickly and at scale.
“Legacy payment systems are struggling to keep up with the rapid digitization of the economy, and lack the necessary flexibility to transfer various assets outside of traditional card networks,” continued Alexander. “By pioneering a first-of-its-kind payment rail, Runa will make it significantly easier to unlock all forms of digital value, and make them available across a wide range of merchant networks.”
