A new app called Dust takes spare change from your transactions and autoinvests it in bitcoin, litecoin or ethereum. This is particularly useful to novice cryptocurrency investors who frequently voice concerns about missing the boat or whether it’s the right time to buy. Dust removes much of this worry by investing once you have accumulated $10 in spare change. It does so by connecting to your bank account and rounding each transaction up to the nearest dollar. It doesn’t connect to your account in order to withdraw the funds either. The app connects solely to view your transaction history and lets Coinbase handle the investment process.
This is possible through a service called Plaid which is also used by popular payments app, Venmo. Plaid allows developers to build apps that bridge to banks.
Users can decide how they want their $10 apportioned across bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum. Investment options are limited to those three assets because they are the only ones listed on Coinbase currently. The app is not live yet, there are 1000 users currently using the beta version with about 20,000 more (myself included) waiting on the alpha release. U.S. customers can already use an app called CoinFlash that allows auto investing on a weekly or monthly basis, however it comes with a $1 a month fee. As of this writing, Dust does not intend to charge users a fee for using their app.
The barrier to entry in cryptocurrency investing is still very high. Compare opening an e-trade account and buying stock to investing in bitcoin. It’s like driving a go cart versus driving a manual automobile. Apps like this will allow more users to access to digital currencies and make bitcoin a part of investment portfolios of any size.