By Riley Kaminer
At the recent Permissionless conference in West Palm Beach, there was one common refrain: Builders need to simplify their UX. While many founders share the aim to onboard millions of users into the web3 space, less tech savvy consumers still have trouble navigating crypto platforms.
One Miami-based company is on a mission to increase the accessibility of crypto to mainstream consumers. Meet cryptMi, which has just launched a card that streamlines all of your digital assets into one place.
“We try to simplify and to unify,” cryptMi CEO Sergio Arana told Refresh Miami. “Now you can use only one card to do everything,” he said, referring to the new offering.
Users can load all their digital assets onto their cryptMi account, including bank cards, cashback rewards, buy now pay later financing programs, and crypto. They can then use a Visa-issued cryptMi card to buy, store, and spend crypto, fiat, and rewards points. The cryptMi card lets users earn up to 5x rewards on every transaction.
While many crypto companies, including the big names like Crypto.com, offer high reward cards, cryptMi’s stands out from the pack in a few ways. For one, users do not need to stake any crypto (the crypto equivalent of a CD: lock up a certain amount of money for a certain period of time) in order to access these rewards. Additionally, users are able to shop for anything using this card – from the metaverse to physical stores, flights and hotels to NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
Their platform is more accessible to non-US consumers, according to Arana. “It can take an international user at least one week to be active on a crypto wallet, but in our case it is immediately if you are one of the four billion cardholders or 300 million crypto holders,” he said.
On top of the Visa partnership, this new offering from cryptMi was also developed alongside Coinbase’s platform. That enables users to tap into cryptocurrency markets right through cryptMi’s offering.
Arana, who originally hails from Bogotá, is a fintech veteran who has worked closely with Visa for more than a decade. Most recently, he has been helping community banks bolster their customer loyalty through rewards programs.
Despite the current volatility in the crypto markets, Arana is unphased. “We are living in a very complex world,” he explained, noting rising inflation and war in Ukraine as two major factors contributing to this uncertainty. “At the end of the day, people still have a credit card or debit card and continue to spend every day. So we have to provide support for that.”
Providing this support with Miami as their home base has played a key role in the development of cryptMi, said Arana. The team originally established their headquarters in San Francisco in 2014, but for logistical reasons eventually put down roots in Miami “before it was a hot city for tech,” noted Arana.
He acknowledged some challenges of being based in Miami, which has fewer resources for tech companies by virtue of its earlier stage of development compared to more established tech hubs. “But I’m very optimistic that we can develop well here,” he said. Half of cryptMi’s 40 employees are based in Miami.
Looking forward, cryptMi plans to continue developing new products to help users simplify their crypto experience. In the third quarter of this year, the company plans to launch a tool enabling merchants to accept payments in crypto.
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