Bill Barhydt talks fast, often in big, sweeping terms that pass with the frequency of mile markers. "We are basically preparing Abra to go global as quickly as possible," he says in interview.
On the phone with CoinDesk, Barhydt even sounds as if he’s flying through space and time, the wind rushing around him audibly as we kick off a conversation about Abra , the peer-to-peer "digital cash" startup for which he has served as CEO since 2014.
While Barhydt exudes velocity, the language he employs seem a far cry from his startups muted public presence.
While the company has raised $14m in two funding rounds , its blog has been updated just a few times since last September, and announcements have been few and far between. Today, Abra is live in only one market. To Barhydt, this is the calm before the storm.
He told CoinDesk: "You will see Abra live in lots of places this year, with some really cool partner announcements and availability announcements. The organized chaos of Abra is moving at a very rapid rate." Barhydt is just as quick in describing the process of Abra’s forthcoming expansion, even with all its complexities. Somehow he reduces balancing acts like signing up global merchants to bootstrap a global cash app, enlisting money services businesses in this network and navigating local regulations into a fairly short series of sentences.
All of this comes even while he refers to Abra as a company that could create the first "viable consumer experience" with blockchain technology – one that, at scale, aims to provide users around the world with abilities never before offered by payments firms.
Last-mile concerns? Liquidity management? Barhydt believes Abra can put these challenges in the rearview.
Materials provided to CoinDesk back up this ambitious scope, indicating that Abra told investors it plans to […]
