Crossing Our Desk:
– Blockchain has doubled its wallet base in just seven months, the company announced this morning. It crossed the two million mark on Monday, twice the one million wallets it had in January, and it makes the company the first to achieve that mark. It also shows that, despite the dearth of big headline stories this year, interest in bitcoin continues to grow rapidly.
It’s certainly growing faster than the company anticipated. “The one thing that we’ve seen about projections is that growth usually exceed our projections,” Peter Smith, Blockchain’s chief operating officer, said in an interview with MoneyBeat Monday. Mr. Smith said the company hit the two million mark about two months earlier than they’d expected.
The company has worked actively to meet that torrid pace. It acquired rights to the bitcoin.com web address in the spring, revamped and released its Android wallet app, and at the end of July, it re-released its Apple AAPL +1.77% iOS wallet app, which in just about two weeks has been downloaded more than 41,000 times, the company reported.
Peter Smith, Blockchain’s chief operating officer, dropped in on the MoneyBeat desk to talk about it, and what this means for the industry:
Mr. Smith attributed the gains to general interest in bitcoin, as well as the acquisition of bitcoin.com, which has become a “major user-acquisition channel for us,” and a relaunch of most of its core software, with an eye toward making it more consumer-friendly. (Paul Vigna)
– On paper, India looks like a bitcoiner’s dream. The country has the world’s second-largest population. It has half a billion “unbanked” poor people and an enormous global diaspora of Indian emigrants, representing a giant potential market for digital remittances and payments. It also has a couple of hundred million tech-savvy middle-class citizens, the kind who should be ready and able to embrace, develop and promote cryptocurrency technology.
So, what’s India’s problem? Why is the country not at the forefront of the digital-currency revolution?
One problem is awareness, says Vikram Nikkam, a co-founder of India’s Unocoin, which provides digital wallets, bitcoin trading and payment processing services. Once Indians start to learn of “how easy it is to obtain and use bitcoin” to reduce payment costs, adoption will grow, he says, with the first movers to be found among India’s IT titans in hubs such as Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai.
Yet the slow uptake also stems from an underdeveloped currency-exchange infrastructure, says bitcoin entrepreneur Barry Silbert, whose Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. has just invested $250,000 in Nikkam’s company. “The catalyst that will drive bitcoin adoption in India is significantly more liquidity and trading in and out of rupees,” Mr. Silbert said. “No one is going to use bitcoin to send money to their family in India if there is no way to use it or no place to exchange it.” Mr. Silbert said he fished around for opportunities in India and decided that Unocoin, whose bitcoins-for-rupees trading service is facilitated by solidly functioning banking relationships, was best placed to tackle this problem.
Bitcoin got off on a bit of rocky start in India from a regulatory standpoint, too. Last year, the Reserve Bank issued stern warnings about trading in bitcoin and moved to shut down various operators accused of being in breach of the Foreign Exchange Management Act.
Unocoin itself was temporarily suspended at that time. However, Nikkam says the firm has since liaised extensively with regulators and has ensured that customers engage with it through banks rather than in cash. The firm, which enforces its own anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance procedures, is no longer concerned about a regulatory crackdown, he said.
Meanwhile, India still has inflation problems hanging over from a scare two years ago, which in theory could present bitcoin as an alternative store of value to the country’s historically preferred save haven, gold.
The problem, says Mr. Nikkam, is that “people are too relaxed” about inflation and have an attitude where “they want to sit back and let the government handle everything.” This too, though, will be overcome with education, he said, confidently predicting that Indians will come to realize bitcoin’s benefits as a way to take charge of their money. (Michael Casey)
