Bitcoin to Amazon person-to-person (P2P) service provider Purse.io (PurseIO, Inc.) has raised $1 million in a seed round from Digital Currency Group.

Founded in 2014, Purse.io offers a service that acquires unwanted Amazon gift cards and certificates and then sells them to users for Bitcoin; a credit is placed in the user’s account that is then used to purchase goods from Amazon, and those who buy the cards are offered a discount on their purchases.

Although still focused on selling Amazon cards for Bitcoin, Purse.io has plans to enter new markets and announced in April that it was looking at expanding its service to allow the exchange of Frequent Flyer points for Bitcoin as well.

The company most recently offered a 10-percent discount special for users wanting to spend their Bitcoin on Amazon’s Black Friday sales, an offer we referred to at the time as “great.”

Along with using the seed round to accelerate Bitcoin commerce, Purse.io said it plans to use the new funding to build “a secret Bitcoin project code named Tritium” that is said to bring new value to consumers and partners.

“We are very excited to be helping consumers spend Bitcoin and receive discounts. We believe our new project will be even more exciting, but we aren’t ready to say anything about it … yet,” PurseIO Chief Executive Officer Andrew Lee said in a statement.

Although not specifying what Tritium involves, the company announced that it had hired Christopher “J.J.” Jeffrey, a former developer at BitPay, Inc. and an open-source developer who maintained and contributed to Bitcore, Copay, Bitcore-node, and Bcoin.

“We are very excited to have J.J. join our team as Chief Technology Officer,” Lee added. “With J.J. leading Tritium, we’re confident we can leverage Bitcoin technology in new use-cases to further our mission of adoption.”

Solid idea

Although experiencing some drama (or should we say a hard lesson) in October when it initially denied user funds being stolen following its servers being hacked (it eventually admitted the theft and reimbursed users), Purse.io’s P2P offering is a solid idea that allows users to access mainstream e-commerce with their Bitcoin, which despite some doom and gloom in some sectors of the press of late continues to grow.

While it’s pure speculation at this point, we can only imagine that the company’s Tritium project will likely see its P2P platform expand to cater for far more markets than simply Amazon gift cards alone.

Including the new round, Purse.io has raised $1.3 million to-date. Previous investors include Roger Ver, Bobby Lee, Jered Kenna, Strong Ventures and Terrence Yang.

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