Lawnmower Converts Change to Bitcoin

The passive savings app Lawnmower is helping to bridge the difficulty gap for Bitcoin, by rounding change and swapping it to bitcoin.
In an effort to combine personal finance management and cryptocurrency curiosity, the team behind the Lawnmower app has created a way to help promote spending consciousness, while also saving Bitcoin. “We’re all about the really passive, low commitment options,” says CFO Alex Sunnarborg.
The app has a simplistic but powerful concept at its core. Each purchase is tracked and rounded up to the nearest dollar, and once a specific amount is reached a Coinbase trade is initiated. Lawnmower CEO Pieter Gorsira explains, “Since this is kind of a familiar concept for some users […] seen before in Acorns or Bank of America’s ‘keep the spare change’ program, it’s something familiar to give them that slight hand-hold into the Bitcoin world.” This combination of familiarity and ease-of-use could be the perfect complimentary assistance to the cryptocurrency learning curve.
“Bitcoin is really intimidating to a lot of the world that is not familiar with it, so we want to give them the easiest [introduction].”
— – Alex Sunnarborg, Lawnmower CFO
Providing a backbone for the traditional banking side is Plaid, with an API that can monitor the transactions of linked accounts. “[Plaid] supports the top 5 US banks – Citigroup, US bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, or Chase,” says Patrick Archambeau, CTO of Lawnmower. “You link one of those accounts which can be a credit, debit, savings, or checking account.”
The Lawnmower app will round these transactions, so if the purchase comes in even at five dollars it will round up to six dollars. If the purchase is two dollars and twenty-five cents, the remaining seventy-five cents will be marked for conversion. No Bitcoin trades are made until a set amount has been reached.
“We accumulate the spare change until it hits four dollars, and when it goes above that we initiate a trade through your coinbase account,” describes Archambeau. The four dollar point is meant to counter the fifteen cent transaction fee administered by Coinbase. By waiting until there is a larger amount collected, the fees are much more manageable than a slew of tiny transactions.
The Lawnmower team hopes the app will help users enter the world of bitcoin, while also inspiring better spending habits. Sunnarborg discusses this further stating, “We’re promoting these small purchases, and it links it to your traditional spending side so it really starts to promote a lot of self-consciousness around your spending and also incorporates bitcoin more into your thought process.”
“We want to branch out into personal finance, and automated money management platform.”
— – Pieter Gorsira, Lawnmower CEO
This approach has proven to promote financial awareness in the past, and future augmentations to the project will increase the users ability to control how much they are saving and what they are saving for.
First on the list of features to be implemented is a slider bar system to control the percentage of change being saved. “With the slider bar you’re going to be able to customize that if you want more or less, to give you that sense of control over it,” Gorsira explains. This would help those particularly motivated to save, allowing them to do so effortlessly after a simple setting adjustment.
This goes hand in hand with a feature to be developed after the slider bar, subwallets. “One of our general plans is to expand into sub-wallets to get you saving for specific things,” Gorsira describes. “So imagine right now you have one generic lawnmower wallet, maybe in the future you can set up a kid’s college fund wallet, or a wallet to save up for a gym membership.”
Lawnmower is a great example of how bitcoin can be utilized as a better alternative to traditional banking systems. It provides users a greater level of control over their finances and savings, and often does so cheaper and quicker than major banks. Sunnarborg emphasizes this – “You don’t have to put an order into your bank to do something that might get executed three days later.”
With such good vision and a wonderfully simple core concept, it is easy to see the potential for Lawnmower to spread bitcoin knowledge to the masses. This free service is doing something that many companies have a hard time accomplishing – making bitcoin accessible. Easy adoption is key to cryptocurrency success, and this team is certainly taking a smart approach to solve current problems.
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