The blockchain of Bitcoin is a high-voltage transmission line. What we need is the transformer for household usage.
The Significance of Blockchain Technology
The current banking industry is similar to the information industry before it became democratized by the internet. A few companies own the infrastructure, and they charge a lot for their slow service. As information infrastructure became accessible to the public in excellent quality, many companies could create an enormous amount of value. For instance, Google provided fast and accurate access to the information you are searching for and became one of the biggest company in the world.
Finance is the market where only a few people can access its core information and tools. A few institutes own the financial network, and they have no reason to open it to the public.
The significance of blockchain technology is that it enables us to transfer value without going through the traditional finance network. Now, you can send wealth like information. In other words, finance became democratized.
Current Limitation
However, Bitcoin is yet to be adopted by the public. The core problem is its volatility. Using Bitcoin is like trying to use electricity directly from high-voltage transmission lines. High voltage is fluctuating in a vast amount, and your electronic devices are not built for such instability. It is just too dangerous.
Bitcoin-Fiat Currency Transformer
That is why my team has built a transformer between bitcoin and fiat currency, Gluwa. We fix exchange-rate for our user, and, as a result, create a network of blockchain where you can save and transfer in your local currency.
Gluwa can be the “ubiquitous mobile-money network that currently exists only in our dreams” that {cryptonight} has mentioned in “Bitcoin Doesn’t Make Remittances Cheaper,” or the “dollar chain or euro chain” Chris Skinner talked about in “Will the Blockchain Replace Swift.”
How We Do It
To put it simply, our users will give up the possibility of gaining from Bitcoin price increase for not losing when the price decreases. The game of exchange speculation is played by other people who want to invest in Bitcoin under the hood.
Possibilities
We are trying to build fiat currency banking infrastructure on blockchain and make once impossible things possible.
For example, according to McKinsey, “Eighty-five percent of the transactions in Southeast Asia are still done in cash” and “25 percent of the total adult population [in ASEAN] has a bank account.” At the same time, the Asia-Pacific region had 1.8 billion unique subscribers and nearly 3.8 billion connections (including M2M) as of the first quarter of 2015 (GSMA).
A developer could build a mobile bank for ASEAN countries with a laptop on top of our infrastructure. As {cryptonight} said, “from a cost perspective, it’s the difference between building a huge server farm versus pay-as-you-go hosting on Amazon AWS, and is a true game-changer.”
