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Peer-to-peer payments are nothing new, as "Venmo me" has become colloquial when splitting a restaurant check. But one company is trying to change the P2P payments game by utilizing blockchain technology.
Abra announced today that its smartphone app is now available on Android and iPhone in the U.S. Users can download the app, fund their Abra wallets immediately with their bank accounts, and send money completely free to other users by just entering their phone number.
But what makes Abra different from Venmo and other P2P payment apps?
“We’re trying to make it possible for the first time to send money between any two phone numbers in the world,” founder and CEO Bill Barhydt told Business Insider. "Venmo, PayPal, etc. physically take possession of your money, and that’s an untenable proposition at a global scale."
So Barhydt went back to the drawing board a few years ago and rethought the problem from scratch. That led to the major idea behind Abra, which is to allow a consumer to hold digital cash on a smartphone for the first time with no third party holding their funds.
Of course, this generated an important question: How do you guarantee the value of a transaction in that case? Abra’s solution is to take Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that underlies it to effectively fix the value of the digital cash in fiat currency in real time without the need for a financial intermediary.
"That has the beautiful property [of introducing] interesting models for getting money on and off the phone in the first place," Barhydt said.To make money more accessible to consumers, the company is launching a new network of "Abra Tellers," or "human ATMs," individuals or businesses […]
