Eco Inc, the crypto payments company with $95 million in funding from a16z, Coinbase Ventures, and other top technology investors, announced the acquisition of Join, a stablecoin-powered shopping app.
This acquisition aligns with Eco’s vision to “create a more efficient, decentralized payment system, breaking away from the limitations of traditional finance.”
Eco has established itself as a key player in “the crypto payments sector, known for its flagship product, Beam, a self-custody wallet that lets users send money to anyone, globally, instantly.”
With the acquisition of Join, Beam will add the capability “to let users seamlessly spend stablecoins with Amazon, Shopify, and other major merchants – all from the same interface.”
By combining the best aspects of crypto and traditional payments, this “represents meaningful progress towards fulfilling crypto’s ultimate promise.”
Andy Bromberg, CEO of Beam, said:
“This marks Eco’s first acquisition and is a milestone for the company. We’re bringing together two mission-driven teams working to increase crypto’s viability for everyday transactions. Combining Join’s seamless merchant integration with Beam’s peer-to-peer payments focus advances our goal of making Beam the best payments product on the market.”
Stablecoins have amassed $134 billion in market capitalization “while online shopping has reached global ubiquity, creating an opportunity for borderless, decentralized, and stable currencies to disrupt the way consumers make purchases and merchants accept payments.”
Recognizing this opportunity, Join was “founded in 2022 by Tom Dean, Jawad Ayoub, and Brad Crook. They created a platform for spending stablecoins at major merchants, boasting a checkout flow faster and more efficient than even standard plugins.”
Backed by prominent figures like Balaji Srinivasan and supported “by a grant from Base, the layer-2 blockchain incubated by Coinbase, Join emerged as an exciting young entrant in the crypto ecosystem.”
Tom Dean, CEO and Co-Founder of Join, said:
“We built Join so crypto could be used as currency without waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. The frictionless spending of stablecoins was the first step and integrating directly into Beam propels this vision even further. Our technology is designed to be simple to use yet fast and incredibly efficient, aligning perfectly with Eco’s objectives. As the crypto ecosystem continues to grow, and we’re looking at the start of the next cycle, this signals that seamless, consumer-friendly crypto payment experiences are finally ready for the global stage.”
As noted in the update, Eco Inc. is a company “dedicated to building better payment experiences. Its core product is Beam, a mainstream self-custody crypto wallet for global payments.”
While traditional payment systems are outdated, constrained by high fees, geographical limitations, and cumbersome processes, Eco meets “the need for a new system that combines the best of traditional and crypto payments, offering ease of use, lower fees, and global accessibility.”
Eco Inc. also contributes to the Eco protocol, “a decentralized currency for real-world use cases. Eco is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, L Catterton, Coinbase Ventures, Founders Fund, Activant Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, and more than 100 other investors.”