The world’s immigrants sent more than half a trillion dollars back to their home countries in 2016. This flow of capital—the largest and most effective foreign aid program by a long shot—is encumbered by high fees and other obstructions that are a result of government policies. In the U.S., the remittance industry has been cartelized by heavy regulation; other nations prevent the free movement of money through fixed (and extremely disadvantageous) exchange rates, taxes, and arbitrary caps on the amount an individual can send in a given year.
Enter Bill Barhydt, the founder and CEO of the Mountain View, California-based startup Abra, which offers a simple way to send money anywhere in the world using a smart phone. The best part is that governments have no power to interfere with Abra’s payment network.
In contrast to apps like Venmo or PayPal, Abra parks digital cash on the phone itself so there’s no need for a third party to clear transactions. It’s also completely peer-to-peer, kind of like handing someone cash—but unlike cash, it’s all digital and doesn’t require a face-to-face hand-off.
Abra’s secret is that it’s built on top of bitcoin, which is what lends it these amazing properties. What sets Abra apart from other bitcoin wallets is that its users don’t need to know what bitcoin is. The complexity is packed under the hood.
I sat down with Barhydt at the Consensus conference in New York City last week to discuss why he launched Abra, bitcoin as “regulatory arbitrage,” and whether rising transaction fees on the bitcoin blockchain could undermine the company’s mission.
For more on Barhydt’s vision, read my 2015 article on the company.
Produced by Ian Keyser.
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