Category: Omni

“I think any company scaling today has to have a crypto strategy. This is the start of ours,” Omni  founder and CEO Tom McLeod tells me. His on-demand property storage and rental marketplace raised $25 million in XRP coins back in January in what some saw as an opportunist move to capitalize on the cryptocurrency boom. That industry has since gone bust, and XRP is in the cross-hairs of regulators who may classify it as a security with extra restrictions.

Now Omni has a way to get rid of some of its XRP. It’s beginning to let people get paid in the coin when they rent their stuff to fellow Omni users. Their balance of earnings is held in USD, but they can cash out to XRP at any time with no fee.

Earlier this month, I wrote that crypto companies are going to become investors in 2018. I didn’t quite imagine that happening as quickly as mid-January, but here we are. Ripple, the fintech startup behind the controversial XRP token, has its first investment after it backed U.S.-based storage startup Omni through a $25 million round.