Former Beem It boss Angela Clark unveils crypto start-up Wallet Nation

Angela Clark says the crypto carnage will be a good thing for her new start-up that has already attracted the attention of high-net private investors.

Former Beem It, Commonwealth Bank and ABC executive Angela Clark has unveiled her next move after a two-year break, co-founding a cryptocurrency wallet – Wallet Nation – that she is confident will gain widespread adoption despite the ongoing crypto carnage.

Ms Clark was most recently chief executive of payments start-up Beem It until 2020, and says she wants to take her passion and expertise for the world of digital payments to cryptocurrency.

Wallet Nation, co-founded with technology veteran Ric Richardson, would make crypto payments the norm by making them safer for everyday users, Ms Clark said.

It is set to launch in the first quarter of 2023, and is backed by a pre-seed funding round from high-net worth private investors.

The company’s technology is an escrow wallet that allows users to release funds once they have received the goods or services they have paid for.

The company will also offer a “chargeback” escrow that will provide consumer protection for in-store or e-commerce purchases using crypto.

“We tried to think about ways that bitcoin and other coins could get back to basics of their fundamental vision, which is much more as a medium of exchange,” Ms Clark said.

“The use case is that there’s real value for people to use crypto in their everyday lives, and the last couple of years crypto has all been speculative and extremely volatile. We think the longer-term value is crypto is a medium of exchange. And we’ve seen a lot that there are poor outcomes for ­people with non-custodial wallets when something goes wrong, and we want to fix that in a very big way.”

A “crypto winter” has descended on the industry with ­prices plunging and companies collapsing, but Ms Clark said that if anything the current market conditions had strengthened, not diminished, her conviction for what she was building.

She said the plunge in valuations would help restore bitcoin’s original vision of being used to buy a coffee, or a house.

“We’ve done research on people who use or have crypto already, and for them it’s an important part of their financial life,” she said. “A lot of people are transacting or converting their crypto, but they have to deal with lots of middlemen in that process and that’s what we want to help solve.”