Chaum started the company DigiCash in 1989 with "ecash" as its trademark. He raised $10 million from David Marquardt and by 1997 Nicholas Negroponte was its chairman.[1] Yet, in the United States, only one bank — the Mark Twain bank in Saint Louis,MO — implemented ecash, testing it as micropayment system;[5] Similar to credit cards, the system was free to purchasers, while merchants paid a transaction fee. After a three-year trial that signed up merely 5,000 customers, the system was dissolved in 1998, one year after the bank had been purchased by Mercantile Bank, a large issuer of credit cards.[5] David Chaum opined then “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped.