Self-storage Omni now lets you rent your stuff for XRP

Omni
COO Ryan Delk and CEO Tom McLeod
Omni

• Omni — a San Francisco-based self-storage startup that’s
  raised over $40 million — is on a mission to transform
  the traditional self-storage world. 
• Omni lets users not only store their items for a flat monthly
  fee per item, but it also allows for those items to be rented,
  helping people earn money on things that would have otherwise
  collected dust. 
• On Wednesday, the company announced it would start letting
  users cash out their rental income by moving it to a
  cryptocurrency wallet (XRP) instead of a conventional bank
  account. 
• “Having a strategy for how you want to work with some degree
  of crypto is important for almost any startup at this point,”
  Omni CEO Tom McLeod told us. 

Costume Town
may look like a typical, online costume rental store —
complete with a replica Stormtrooper suit and Spider-Man
onesie — but behind the scenes, it runs a little
differently. 

Rather than keep its inventory in a storefront or warehouse,
Costume Town is built on Omni — the San Francisco-based
startup that’s on a mission to transform the traditional
self-storage world. 

Omni lets users not only store their items for a flat monthly fee
per item, but it also allows for those items to be rented to
strangers, helping it customers earn money on things — like
fancy plates, or crutches  — that would have otherwise
collected dust. Some, like Costume Town, use Omni as the back-end
inventory storage for their business. 

When you want to store an item, you schedule a pickup, and an
Omni courier grabs it from you. When you want it back, same deal;
just use the app to schedule a dropoff. A skateboard might cost
you $1/day to store with Omni, while a Segway scooter might run
$20/day. Pickups and dropoffs can be free, depending on the time
of day.

“We’re always trying to push the boundaries on how people think
about assets, ownership, and access,” Omni CEO Tom McLeod told
Business Insider in a recent interview. 

On Wednesday, Omni announced it was pushing those boundaries even
further by letting users cash out their rental income by
moving it to an XRP wallet. XRP is a cryptocurrency (or
token) that was originated by the blockchain company Ripple. 

McLeod tells us when a user decides to cash out, his company will
look at the current prices across the top five XRP exchanges and
offer the average of those amounts to be transferred to a
user’s XRP wallet. Once the transfer is complete,
users can store that value in their wallets and, when they decide
the time is right, trade it for regular money.

“We think of Omni as a tool for unlocking liquidity. Rentals
give you the ability to unlock value while still maintaining that
asset, ” McLeod explains. “Now [with the XRP
integration] you can also look at one of your items as an
investment and then double dip into another investment off the
back of it.” 

McLeod gives the example of a tent that rents for $50 over the
weekend. An Omni user can cash out $25 in USD to their
traditional bank account and move the remaining $25 to their XRP
wallet as an investment. 

Omni COO Ryan Delk explains that the reason XRP was such a great
fit for this dip into cryptocurrency was mainly because of the
token’s liquidity.

“The transaction confirmation speed is incredibly fast (seconds),
the cost to transfer is really low (pennies), and it’s very
liquid — you can move XRP into any other currency on any
major exchange,” he said. 

Omni hasn’t been shy about its interest in crypto. Part of its
recent
$25 million funding round came from two Ripple
executives — Chris Larsen and Stefan Thomas — in the
form of Ripple’s XRP token. 

“Having a strategy for how you want to work with some degree of
crypto is important for almost any startup at this
point,” McLeod said. “This is us dipping our toe in with a
partner that has worked with us in the past.” 

Beyond the XRP integration, Delk tells us that bringing its
services to more cities across the US will be a focus for the
company. Last month, the storage-startup that’s raised over
$40 million in funding
began operating in Portland — its the first market outside
of the Bay Area. 

The company also wants to invest in building out tools for
businesses, like Costume Town, which are actually relying on
Omni to make their own businesses run.

“Probably similar to Airbnb when people starting going beyond
just listing their own home. Or the same thing Uber went through
where people bought more cars to have more people drive for
Uber,” Delk explains. “We’re starting to see that moment
happen [at Omni], which is pretty exciting.”