Lorien Gamaroff: Making users adopt Bitcoin without realizing it

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Centbee continues to work on its mission to not just be a great Bitcoin app, but to make it easier for customers to adopt Bitcoin and have more freedom with their money. To talk about the next steps in that mission, CEO Lorien Gamaroff joined CoinGeek.com’s Becky Liggero at the recent CoinGeek Toronto scaling conference.

Adoption is the most important factor in Bitcoin’s growth, and Centbee is laser focused on helping grow the community with easy solutions. “We thought, if we can make it possible to buy Bitcoin as easily as buying bread and milk, or your groceries, then we can really solve a massive onboarding problem,” Gamaroff explained. “So what we’ve done now is we’ve actually released a product, basically what we do is we integrate with some digital service providers that link the retailers to us. When a customer goes into a store with their Centbee wallet, they can generate a barcode on the wallet, they can show it to any retailer, and the retailer will scan that barcode, receive cash over the counter, and immediately Bitcoin is loaded onto your phone.”

A big step towards creating that adoption, without the customer even realizing it, is in money remittance. “When it comes to moving money across border, what we call cross border remittance, it’s a very expensive affair, especially if you’re living in an African country,” he told us. “What we see in Africa is a lot of people coming from poorer countries come down to Southern Africa, which is a much longer economy, and they work there. But then they send money home to their relatives every month. And they don’t spend a lot, sometimes a few hundred dollars, but what happens then is that they have to now pay a 15%-20% fee on that.”

Centbee already has a solution to this problem, and its going to introduce Bitcoin SV (BSV) to Africa on a massive scale. “What we’ve now created is a new product where the customer doesn’t have to know they are actually buying Bitcoin,” Gamaroff told Liggero. “They will go into a local retailer and say they want to now send money home to a family member in Nigeria, they will use a Centbee remit app that we have now, they will then hand over the cash. Immediately, what will happen then is that we will send the Bitcoin value to a different country, and then convert it and settle into bank accounts, and also into mobile money, at a greatly reduced cost.”

Liggero asked him what’s coming next for Centbee, and while he couldn’t discuss specifics, the future looks right. “Of course, I’m always full of ideas,” he replied. “We want to make Centbee much more social. We’ve always thought of Centbee as a social networking app. Money is quite a social thing, so of course we’re going to be including a lot more social features into Centbee…We certainly intend making Centbee everybody’s favorite Bitcoin app.”

Watch Lorien Gamaroff’s presentation at the CoinGeek Toronto 2019 – Main Conference Day: