Since launching on June 13, 2019, Terra’s mobile payment dApp CHAI has been growing at a rapid pace. CHAI is now integrated with seven mainstream online platforms in Korea — including TMON, one of the largest eCommerce platforms with 9 million users, and Yanolja, the no.1 hospitality app that annually processes $2 billion.
To give you a better sense of how rapid our growth has been, here’s what we’ve accomplished so far:
500,000+ users
During its first four months, CHAI has grown at an average week-over-week growth rate of 16.1 percent, gaining over 500,000 users who have linked their bank account to the platform. Among those users, roughly 85% have completed at least 1 transaction.
Consequently, we’ve already exceeded our target of capturing 10% of TMON’s market share in 6 months. As of September, CHAI has successfully taken up 11.4% market share of TMON’s total transaction volume. It’s important to note that 90% of this came from credit card users, meaning more savings on transaction fees for TMON and signaling the overall rapid growth of mobile payments in Korea.
$54 million transacted to date
On average, a CHAI user spends about $20.30 per transaction, with the total number of transactions exceeding 2.7 million. With a pool of such avid users, no wonder CHAI was able to process over $54 million in just four months!
As we continue to add more online partners and launch offline payments with CU, Korea’s largest convenience store chain with 14,000 locations, we expect our transaction volume to continue to grow to 3x our current annual run rate of $375 million.
$810,000 in transaction fees saved for merchants
While most merchants pay about 2.5% ~ 3% as transaction fees, we replace the complicated value chain with a single blockchain layer to offer rates as low as 0.5%. Assuming that we’ve saved at least 1.5% on transaction fees for our partners, we can estimate our current savings to be $810,000. As our transaction volume and market share continues to grow, savings will also grow and have a larger impact on our partner’s P&L.
Korea runs on Terra
So what does CHAI’s success and growing transaction volume mean for Terra? CHAI utilizes Terra’s blockchain and stablecoin economy to offer lower transaction fees and fund ongoing discounts. Since Terra’s mainnet launch in April, Terra has become one of the most actively used blockchains in the world, with our community including 66 stellar validators.
In fact, if we compare CHAI’s daily active user number of 40,000 with the 24h active address numbers of some of the top tokens with the highest market cap, you can see that Terra is quickly becoming one of the most active blockchains in the world. CHAI hit 57,815 daily active users, and that placed us close to Litecoin in terms of adoption.
Besides the imminent CU integration, the ‘CHAI Card’ is also slated to launch early next year with Korea’s largest payment processor BC Card. This will be a game changer, allowing users to pay basically anywhere with Terra’s payment network. With CHAI, we have created a clear roadmap for Terra to process a large portion of Korea’s online and offline transactions, ringing truth to our tagline ‘Korea runs on Terra’. All that’s left to say is … Onwards!
For more Terra metrics, please visit or download Terra Station: https://station.terra.money/
* Data was collected from June 11, 2019 to October 22, 2019.
*Disclaimer: All transaction data contained herein relating to CHAI was provided by CHAI, a partner of Terra.
