In December, 2018, we launched ParJar. The idea was to make a crypto wallet that could live in group chats and let people swap crypto coins in a super easy way. We picked our first social media platform, Telegram, and launched a wallet that did a few big jobs:

It made crypto fun. It made crypto easy. It made crypto social.

What made ParJar different, was that people didn’t have to completely understand how crypto worked in order to use it. People were getting coins without setting up a wallet, sending coins without understanding network fees, and slowly learning about cryptocurrency while having it in their hands. ParJar was launched to make crypto easy, and it was doing just that for anyone who used it.

Because ParJar has no network fees, you can send someone 10 cents of Bitcoin, or a dollar of Ether as you chat. As we saw people swapping coins over thousands of times in group chats, we were seeing that crypto was becoming social.

While I do believe the coolest concept I’ve learned over the last year is that cryptocurrency lets me instantly create my own personal bank anytime I want, I believe the strength of blockchain also acts as a barrier to making it fun.

I remember my first Bitcoin transfer. I waited almost an hour for my Bitcoin to move wallets as I kept hitting the refresh button on my browser. It was amazing, but I wouldn’t have used the word fun to describe it. While I do believe the coolest concept I’ve learned over the last year is that cryptocurrency lets me instantly create my own personal bank anytime I want, I believe the strength of blockchain also acts as a barrier to making it fun.

ParJar was not made to act as a bank but, as the name implies, as a place where you keep a few bucks of your favorite coins to swap around with friends, pay for a beer, or send someone a tip. It isn’t the end-all solution for cryptocurrency, but it does make it fun for people to use and fun is a good place to start.

Within the month we’ll be launching a new feature on ParJar that gives the user an option to use PAR instead of ETH for Ethereum network fees related to withdrawals and transfers

Today, over 9,000 people use ParJar as a way to interact with their friends. We’ve had over 100,000 transactions in the last 6 months with 75% of those happening in the last two. We’ve seen ParJar do a job that people wanted to get done. Finally, we built the tool that made crypto a place that was fun, easy, and social. We would have never started out with something like this and only ended up here after the year we spent exploring ideas and ruling out the things people didn’t need.

Par and the Parachute Products.

The idea of ParJar is to be a launchpad for the world of Parachute products. Next, we’re launching additional products that keep true to our core beliefs while expanding how people and businesses use crypto in their daily lives; and we’re making PAR the foundation of it all.

PAR has been the lifeblood of our community but it hasn’t always had a clear purpose. Like the ideas and directions we explored, we also explored how PAR could fit into our world in an organic way that wasn’t forced, and that pushed forward our ideas of how cryptocurrency should exist. With our new products, we’ve done this.

Within the month we’ll be launching a new feature on ParJar that gives the user an option to use PAR instead of ETH for Ethereum network fees related to withdrawals and transfers. As we’ve seen with people who enter the cryptocurrency space, a common UX barrier everyone has is that it instantly becomes complicated, time consuming, and frustrating to use once they have managed to purchase it.

Using PAR, you can send any supported erc20 token to another wallet, service provider, or Dapp without having to purchase or transfer Ether. Having created an ecosystem where people can enter our products and touch PAR as their first cryptocurrency, it places a higher value on interacting in our world over buying ETH to use as gas.

We’ll be launching these products and features with over 9,000 users and a target to expand to over 1 million active users by 2021.

A prototype of the Parachute universal QR

PAR will continue to be a part of what we build — from launching a universal QR code for all your cryptocurrencies — to letting stores connect with people through our platform — PAR now is a core part of everything we build.

We gave out 250m PAR in the last year and a half. Going forward, we’re giving out 270m more PAR scheduled over the next three years. Keeping with our original mission, we’ll be giving it out to new users and existing members who want to learn about crypto, be a part of our world, and use the products we build.