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TipLink’s premise is simple: Create a new crypto wallet, deposit money, and send it—wallet and all—to a recipient using a link.
Now that premise is about to be tested on a large scale.
The company just closed a $6 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital and Sequoia Capital. Circle Ventures, Solana Ventures and Paxos also participated in the round. Along with the newly raised funds, TipLink is also releasing its API, which developers can use to programmatically generate TipLinks.
Despite its simplicity, the service has stirred 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 that anyone would guess the randomly generated link used to send someone money.
“It’s basically mathematically impossible. There are too many combinations for you to guess the links,” Krotinsky said Decrypt during a conversation 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 that you don’t send money or NFTs to people without having any interaction with them. It is very difficult to just get a message with money.”
Basic internet hygiene still applies, he said. Do not click on links to accept money from strangers, or even acquaintances, without first confirming that it is safe.
Once a user has connected their wallet to TipLink, they can deposit money and then transfer ownership by sharing a link. Each transaction also creates a new wallet, so the recipient does not need to download a new browser extension or app to use the money. And if the recipient doesn’t claim the funds, the sender can still claim them back.
“I don’t need to ask you for your Venmo name or your pub key or your domain name to send or receive crypto,” said Multicoin Capital Partner JR Reed. “While seemingly simple, this is a deep unlock that allows 1-to-many sending and receiving, which is currently not 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 some time.
“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 sit there for 20 seconds waiting for a link to load, he said. “It’s like, what do we do?”
Instead of building their own Tier 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 tokens on the network since early January.
Krotinsky said making TipLink multi-chain is on the team’s roadmap, with priority given to any chain that has high throughput and low transaction costs.
