Crypto startup Pillow, backed by Accel and Quona, to halt all services

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Singapore-headquartered Pillow plans to shut down all of its services and apps in the coming weeks, customers warned on Friday, citing regulatory uncertainty that has claimed the lives of countless other crypto startups in the world. during the last quarters.

Pillow allowed clients to invest in Bitcoin, stablecoins and altcoins, and promised returns of up to 18% – a figure that fell to 14% as the market began to cool. It had raised about $21 million in total and counted Accel India, Quona Capital, Elevation Capital and Jump Crypto among its backers. Pillow revealed its $18 million Series A funding in October last year.

In a message on Telegram, the two-year-old startup asked customers on Friday to withdraw all their funds from the Pillow app and said it would end all of its current services on July 31, 2023.

The move follows Pillow’s main rival, Flint, which shut down its services last month due to what it called “regulatory hurdles” and “negative market sentiment”.

The Pillow Fund Telegram group rn is absolutely bonkers

A guy who invested US$800,000 in Pillow (Rs. 6cr, mind you) is asking valid questions about where Pillow is investing.

non-Pillow team members (other users) answering “beginners, please read the FAQ before asking stupid questions”

— Arnav Gupta (@championswimmer) May 14, 2022

Both startups, founded and operated in India, counted the South Asian nation among their biggest markets. The Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, has been pushing lenders to stop engaging with crypto startups for over a year, making it virtually impossible for web3 startups to operate in the country.

Crypto giant Coinbase, one of the largest exchanges in the world, found out the hard way. It suspended support for the UPI payment instrument on its app in India last year, rendering its eponymous exchange non-functional for any order forms less than four days after the trading service launched on the second most largest Internet market in the world.

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong claimed last year that there were elements in the government there, including at the Reserve Bank of India, that didn’t seem to be so positive about it. And so in the press it’s been called a phantom ban, basically they’re applying a little pressure behind the scenes to try and disable some of these payments, which might go through UPI.

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