SphereOne Raises $2.5M To Create Cryptocurrency For Grandmas

SphereOne, a crypto payment platform that allows users to make purchases with any cryptocurrency on any blockchain, today announced the closing of a $2.5 million seed round led by Distributed Global and featuring Newark Venture Partners, Zero Knowledge, as well as an angel. investors Leor Avidar of Alt.xyz and Lob.com and Eric Feldman of Bolt.com. The SphereOne platform prioritizes the speed of transactions, and features include one-click payment, as well as the ability to facilitate the exchange of fiat to cryptocurrency and vice versa.

“The user experience for consumers using cryptocurrencies for payments is fragmented.” said Christopher Rice, COO and co-founder of SphereOne. “Web3 consumers keep telling us that moving liquidity across different chains to buy things is difficult, time consuming and risky.”

According to Chainalysis, around $2 billion in crypto was stolen in 13 separate cross-chain bridge hacks, most of which were stolen this year. Consumer confidence has been eroded and increased security is critical to making the next wave of users feel good about using crypto payments.

The founding team of SphereOne has a unique mandate in both the security infrastructure and early-stage products to create a platform capable of protecting tomorrow’s consumers. Previously, Rice was a product recruiter at Cylance Inc. (acquired for $1.4 billion) and later led the security infrastructure product portfolio at Oracle. Rice also worked in the public sector, protecting critical Pentagon infrastructure. McNutt has experience in product development and is an experienced founder of 3X with multiple exits. As the founder and CEO of ApplyAll (an AI startup), he has grown the business to over 100,000 MAUs and has successfully led robust global engineering teams.

“We are so focused on creating the best user experience for first-time cryptocurrency users that I often joke with Chris that we are creating a grandmother’s cryptocurrency because we want someone to participate in Web3.” said Ryan McNutt, CEO and co-founder of SphereOne.

SphereOne helps merchants improve conversion rates and customer retention by making it easier for customers to make purchases using any cryptocurrency. Early adopters of the SphereOne crypto payment platform come from a variety of verticals (including traditional e-commerce), but the Web3 gaming segment has proven to be the most attractive.

“If you’re a publisher of Web3 games, it’s important to focus on onboarding Web2 players because that’s where most of the opportunity lies. SphereOne is an integral part of our payment stack as it creates an abstraction layer for users not familiar with crypto infrastructure and allows us to enable various blockchains without direct support.” explained Jacob Sloan, CEO of MetaOps (a popular first-person shooter on Fractal.is).

Perhaps the biggest opportunities for SphereOne are in developing countries where crypto payments have flourished in the absence of traditional financial offerings.

Concluding, McNutt said, “We are very excited to launch our mobile app for peer-to-peer transactions internationally, especially in developing countries. Our crypto payment technology will be widely applicable to users in these regions given our low fee structure.”