Short stories and numbers that rarely make it into reviews. Each one has a primary source we opened and read ourselves.
Where a fact rests on someone else’s retelling rather than a primary source, we say so in the text. Spotted a mistake — write to @RNBWwiki and we will fix it.
The team started in late 2016 with Balance — a personal budgeting app with nothing to do with crypto. It found its first users, but the authors were drawn more and more to Ethereum, and the company pivoted. By 2019 their views on the product had diverged: Christian Baroni, Jin Chung and Mike Demarais broke away into a new company, while Balance co-founder Richard Burton stayed behind.
They announced the split openly — in the very post that introduced the wallet, on 10 April 2019.
“Today we’re excited to announce Rainbow, a new company from the former core team at Balance — Christian Baroni, Jin Chung, and Mike Demarais.”
“In late 2016, Christian and Richard Burton started Balance together. We’d originally set out to build a personal finance app. It found some early traction, but at the same time we were becoming more and more fascinated by Ethereum…”
“We decided to pivot the company… Christian and Mike led the project, while Richard focused on fundraising and marketing. But as the project evolved, our visions for the product and the company diverged. Unable to find common ground, we agreed it was best to part ways.”
Announcing Rainbow, Rainbow’s official blog on Medium, 10 April 2019.
Primary source: Announcing Rainbow — a post on Rainbow’s official Medium account. The founding line-up and the year are independently confirmed by Rainbow’s Y Combinator page and its Crunchbase profile.