Livestream with Austin Kimm: New App Features and Partnerships
From Asian and European partnerships to new use cases and global marketing plans — catch up what Crypterium COO & Co-founder Austin Kimm had to say during a recent AMA session.
If you have missed it, watch the full recording on our YouTube Channel, or take a look at the highlights.
Announcing app updates
Right now, there is a lot of exciting activity. We have enabled our users to top up their mobile phones pretty much anywhere in the world. There are over 500 mobile phones operators connected, and they cover over a hundred countries.
We will also enable you to send crypto to somebody else by just putting in a mobile phone number.
Another feature is called “B-pay”, an Australian equivalent of IBAN payments. It allows you to pay for your electricity bill, your gas bill or whatever directly from your crypto wallet into a bank account. It also means that you can pay to somebody else’s bank account. You can go from your wallet straight into somebody else’s bank account without having to mess around with all sorts of conversions, exchanges etc. We did beta-tests of this a long time ago and there was no problem with it. So this is what we are going to go live with.
We are also going to release a voucher system. Say, you’d like to pay for your hotel using cryptocurrency and you are on hotels.com. It’s very difficult to do this right now, but using a feature we’re working on, you will be able to buy a voucher for the exact amount that you wanted to pay hotels.com.
NFC is coming
The holy grail of payments is to be able to pay at NFC terminals in stores with Crypterium App. Our partner is now on board, we are working very closely with that partner. We are also very close with Visa and MasterCard. We expect to have that launched early in October.
We’ve also got IBAN payments coming up there in September.
Striking new partnerships
Two weeks ago Marc and I were in Asia. We had a wonderful tour in Singapore and South Korea.
South Korea is a difficult market, they’ve got some issues with regulation right now. But we found the solution, we think. We found a partner we are going to join forces with.
Singapore is much more open. We found many partners there. One I’m really excited about is Union Pay. It’s China’s equivalent of VISA or MasterCard. And they have some really good use cases. First of all, you can withdraw money from an ATM. Imagine, that we are able to issue a Union Pay card and that would enable you to go to an ATM and withdraw bitcoins.
I think it’s a wonderful use case. And even if Union Pay, perhaps, is not available, say, in Starbucks in Seattle, it could be available at your local ATM machine. They have 60% global coverage and they are very big in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. So this is a very exciting partnership we are developing.
Marketing plans
We ran our ICO, we sold our tokens to 72 000 people, that was a world record. No other ICO in history has ever had so many token holders. We also had 400 000 people who said: “I like your product, but I don’t want to buy your tokens. Let me know when it’s ready, I’ll be interested”.
So we know how to do the mass marketing very well, but there is no point to do it right now. People will likely say: “So I can top up my mobile phone, but I can’t yet pay for my coffee at Starbucks.
When launch NFC payments, that’s when it’s reasonable to start doing the mass marketing.
Burn the tokens
There is no change on our vision on burning mechanism of CRPT tokens. As we’ve described, we’ll burn them on a weekly basis to start with. And then, as we get much more activity, we’ll move from weekly to daily, and eventually, from daily to hourly, if necessary.
We’ll probably do the first burn first CRPT tokens in a week or so. There isn’t just enough yet to justify the burning process. And we have all the procedures lined up, we know exactly what to do. It will be just not as frequent as it will be with the fully-operation app, carrying out NFC, for example.
About Crypterium
Crypterium is building a mobile app that will turn cryptocurrencies into money that you can spend with the same ease as cash.
Shop around the world to pay with your coins and tokens at any NFC terminal, or via scanning the QR codes. Make purchases in online stores, pay your bills, or just send money across borders in seconds reliably and for a fraction of a penny.
Learn more at http://crypterium.com/ and join the discussions in our Telegram Chat.
