By Solomon Odunayo
It has been brought to our notice that a Ripple-backed San Francisco based peer-to-peer (p2p) rental startup, Omni has finally shut down its operation.
Sometimes in January 2018, the executives of Ripple, the US-based blockchain tech reportedly led a $25 million fundraising for the embattled exchange Omni.
The blockchain tech, Ripple, continued its support for Omni by including the exchange on its list of initial companies backed by Xpring. Within the span of Omni’s existence, it served by offering people means to rent items in a peer-to-peer (p2p) manner using the digital token XRP or cash
As reported by Cointelegraph on 26th November 2019, Coinbase, the US-based cryptocurrency exchange had once moved to hire the embattled Omni’s engineering team sometimes in October 2019.
Going by the report, at the time of negotiating with Coinbase regarding its engineering team, Omni’s daily business had gone worse, due to problems arising from getting customers.
Omni actually tried its best to save the business by planning to launch a white-label service that will give room to the merchants to market their personal rental services.
Omni emerged in 2015, finally shuts down in 2020. As aforementioned, Ripple invested $25 million in the p2p rental startup in early 2018, however, it’s still a matter of speculation if Omni has a backup plan to refund its capital investors such as Ripple.
Read the statement which Omni left on its completely empty official website a few hours ago:
Dear customers and partners,
Since 2014, we’ve been committed to giving you access to the things you need when you need them, encouraging communities to share more and buy less. We’ve been honored to work with small businesses and the communities they serve.
After deep consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our platform and end operations.
More than anything, we want to say thank you to our customers, partners and community who have shown us a tremendous amount of love and support over the last five and a half years. Thank you for including Omni in life’s big moments, from birthday parties to family reunions to Friendsgivings, and joining us in an effort to reduce waste and enable more conscious consumerism.
It’s been wonderful to share our dream with you and we hope you continue to seek out ways to access more and buy less.
Thank you!
Team Omni