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Does Bitcoin/Crypto/Blockchain make sense for international money transfers?

Bitcoin money transfer: competing with fast elephant

“I think we will know when bitcoin has reached prime time when it is transferring more value each day than Western Union or Money Gram…”

Roger Ver, November 2013

Since the publication of “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” in 2008, international money transfers, although constituting a smaller portion of cross-border payments, have emerged as one of the most promising use cases for crypto.

The initial assumption was that remittance users were experiencing exorbitant fees and subpar services from traditional players like Western Union. The prospect of an almost cost-free and instantaneous blockchain-based solution appeared to be a much-needed relief. Additionally, it presented an opportunity for affluent individuals in Western countries to showcase their efforts toward promoting financial inclusion in developing nations.

Subsequently, many startups received funding to test this hypothesis with consumers and partner with money transfer operators (MTOs). Additionally, one country recognized this as a national priority and encouraged its citizens to explore cryptocurrency-based remittances.

Despite this, the adoption of cryptocurrencies for remittances is lower today than a decade ago. Using crypto for international money transfers remains a pilot or pay-per-play. More importantly, nobody can articulate an in-depth case of using private, public, or government crypto instead of or on top of Swift + local real-time rails.

In contrast, non-crypto fintechs such as Wise and Remitly have emerged among the global leaders. What factors have contributed to the disappointing start for crypto, and will this innovative technology have a more significant impact in the future?

Innovation Adoption: 3 Cases

Consumers and businesses possess trillions of disposable income that they eagerly spend on various products and services, regardless of whether they are beneficial. For instance, consumers collectively spend around a trillion dollars annually on alcohol, junk food, or tobacco. Introducing truly innovative technology is an even easier proposition. Financial services and insurance companies allocate a trillion dollars annually to technology spending alone. Apple generates $200 billion just from iPhone sales. While generative AI is still in the pilot stage, Nvidia’s annual sales of AI chips have already reached $50 billion. To achieve similar success, blockchain technology only needs to address one of the three following use cases:

  1. Incumbents fail to address customer pain points (Blockbuster -> Netflix).
  2. Incumbents lack a scalable business model (Borders -> Amazon).
  3. Technology spawns entirely new demand (radio -> Spotify).

Is a significant segment of money transfer users suffering without crypto?

Articles with titles like “The Unexpected Tragedy Of The Financial System” have been prevalent for the past decade. These virtue-signaling stories often promote crypto to help the poor in developing markets but lack field research or customer surveys. Overall, consumers pay annually around $60 billion to money transfer providers, both for remittances and C2B use cases like education. Remittances account for about half of that amount, and it would be neat to figure out a way to provide the same service while the industry is earning much less.

The question remains: Are consumers genuinely dissatisfied with their current cross-border money transfer providers? In 2022, a US government agency responsible for consumer financial protection received only 1,500 complaints, despite a billion transactions totaling $200 billion in cross-border money transfers. Interestingly, during the same period, the agency received 25% more complaints about virtual currencies, even though their adoption was much smaller.

Engaging in conversations with a sufficient number of low-income consumers who conduct international money transfers would reveal that there is no “tragedy” as often portrayed. What’s even more perplexing is that this segment doesn’t seem particularly motivated to save on money transfers. In one survey conducted in 2016, even before the fintech-driven decline in prices, only 15% of migrants believed that their current provider was expensive.

Inter-American Dialogue Survey - Feedback 2016

The reluctance of low-income senders to save money on international transfers is not due to a lack of infrastructure. Over 90% of cash senders possess smartphones, and more than 80% have bank accounts that could be readily linked for online money transfers. Despite these available options, many still prefer using cash agents, resulting in them paying 2-3 times more for sending money home. The transition from offline to online remittances has been progressing by 1-2% annually. It wasn’t until the global pandemic in 2020 that this shift towards digital methods experienced a temporary acceleration (source: Family Remittances 2022 in Numbers):

The gradual shift in payment habits is not exclusive to remittances. Indeed, it has taken decades for consumers to transition from cash to plastic cards, from paper checks to online billing, or from the traditional “swipe-insert” plastic card to the modern “touch” payment methods using smartphones or smartwatches. The consistent underlying reason for these slow transitions is that consumers do not perceive any issues with their traditional payment methods.

Source: The Federal Reserve Payments Study: 2022

Can crypto money transfer help the needy?

Crypto- or fiat-based fintechs focusing on money transfers often use narratives involving “unbanked,” “poor,” or “women” recipients of remittances in developing countries as their inception story. Consider the scenario of a hunger-stricken woman with no financial accounts in a sub-Saharan village. We are asked to believe that the founders are losing sleep trying to find a way to improve her situation through the use of their digital remittance solution. Similar to the stories about the challenges faced by remittance senders, it’s quite likely that these startup founders have never actually encountered such a person. Their claims often lack specificity regarding how to target such segments and an explanation of the viability of generating revenue through such challenging targeting.

Bitcoin money transfer for unbanked

The argument about crypto remittances helping unbanked consumers contains misconceptions regarding both the sending and receiving ends of a money transfer transaction. As we previously discussed, a significant majority of senders have both a bank account and a smartphone and are generally content with their experience of sending cash. However, the question arises: why do they choose to send cash? In certain corridors, a substantial portion of consumers opt for cash transfers to avoid potential deportation and taxation issues. Luckily for them, since Western governments often face challenges in managing seasonal migrant labor, financial regulators adopt more lenient identification standards for individuals sending smaller amounts (under $3,000) cross-border in cash compared to digital channels.

Here’s how the CEO of a major traditional provider described this challenge:

Intermex CEO on undocumented customers May 2018

Crypto-based money transfer firms could theoretically help these people with an anonymous solution, but that would be illegal. Meanwhile, starting in 2023, several well-funded fintechs have begun targeting this segment with less stringent identification requirements (Alza, Majority, Maza). There has not been a reaction from US regulators yet, but for now, this further diminishes the already limited number of “unbanked” users of remittances.

An even more significant impact on banking unbanked consumers has resulted from fintech companies operating in the largest developing countries, such as China and India. Startups like Alipay, WeChat Pay, and Paytm have successfully brought hundreds of millions of previously unbanked consumers into the digital financial ecosystem, enabling them to receive money and make digital payments.

Another significant driver of banking the unbanked arises from the governments of developing countries that are implementing real-time payment systems with payment accounts for their citizens. Examples include India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix, both of which have brought tens of millions of previously unbanked citizens into the financial fold in recent years.

As a result, the number of unbanked individuals has been rapidly decreasing, from 2.5 billion in 2011 to 1.4 billion in 2021, even amidst a significant global population increase of approximately one billion during that decade. With this trajectory, it’s conceivable that the developing world could reach a level of financial inclusion comparable to that of developed economies by 2050.

But even for the remaining unbanked consumers on the receiving end of remittances, it does not pose a significant inconvenience or cost issue. With approximately half a million Western Union agent locations, along with a similar count for Ria and MoneyGram, money can be easily collected by the vast majority of unbanked recipients. There is so much capacity that around 30% of these locations experience no remittance activity. While there will always be pockets of consumers residing in extremely remote areas, reaching them electronically in a cost-effective manner would necessitate expensive technologies similar to Starlink.

can bitcoin money transfer be available in remote places?

In terms of pricing, unbanked consumers are not significantly disadvantaged since the sender covers all the fees. Moreover, receiving money digitally is only slightly less expensive, typically costing around 1% of the transaction amount for a typical transfer.

Unbanked consumers could also receive money instantly for the last two decades, albeit, it might cost a sender a bit more. As developing countries have been introducing real-time payment rails, money transfer incumbents and fintechs are easily plugging their networks into those new rails, delivering money instantly across the globe.

Many of the early crypto remittance startups were established before 2015 by individuals without significant cross-border expertise, who were unaware of these facts. They held a genuine hope of assisting the unbanked with remittances. In contrast, founders of blockchain-based startups that emerged after 2016 typically came from the industry, well aware of this information. Nonetheless, they still repeat the same pitch of aiding the “2 billion unbanked” while targeting digitally-savvy, more affluent consumers.

Everex Blockchain Startup Aug 12 2017
Source: Everex (August 12, 2017)

There is good news for crypto enthusiasts who genuinely embraced this novel technology to alleviate the suffering of the poor, unbanked, women, and other marginalized groups. Don’t be disheartened by the lack of crypto adoption by these individuals. Even if the crypto ecosystem were to disappear tomorrow, traditional technologies and methods have a proven track record of effectively addressing poverty and fulfilling the financial needs of these marginalized populations.

Bitcoin/Crypto/Blockchain money transfer is instant and, thus, doesn’t carry the FX volatility

The “nearly-instant-free” transfer via Bitcoin was true to some extent up until the middle of 2015, but the Bitcoin community was unable to solve a technical problem that led to systematic transfer delays and higher fees (see details here). However, Blockchain proponents associated with the likes of Coinbase and Ripple like to make misleading or ignorant statements about traditional fiat-based players providing an inferior service. They often point to the enormous time lag for sending money using traditional methods. Here is an idiotic explanation from the interview with Ripple’s executive in October 2019:

In reality, already in the late 90s, all major money transfer providers were offering money transfers in minutes. Since the mid-2000s, Xoom has been offering the same transfer speed digitally. By 2023, Wise’s (global digital leader of x-border money transfers) one-day transfers reached 94% while instant transfers were 60% of all transactions.

Source: Wise

By 2023, approximately 80% of all payments on Swift were sent via its modern gpi rail. 40% of gpi payments were credited to end beneficiaries within 5 minutes, while almost 100% of gpi payments were credited within 24 hours.

In the world’s largest corridor, USA-to-Mexico, most of the providers already deliver funds in minutes (see full results at https://limonfinancial.com/envios-dinero/envios-de-dinero-a-mexico/):

Comparison of providers – the US to Mexico, $500, bank-to-bank, April 2023

The reason that non-crypto money transmitters could already send money instantly is that they built strong risk management capabilities and local bank connectivity. Plus, sending money via a debit card, while costing slightly more, is also instant as providers see less risk in those transfers. Banks historically had to rely on outdated government networks which could take a few days to confirm a transfer. But since the mid-2000s, Australia, the UK, and other countries have been implementing a near-real-time payment capability. Similar implementations in other countries, such as the USA and Canada, are already wrapping up, with most developed countries expecting to launch near-real-time rails by 2025.

So any speed advantage of Bitcoin-crypto-blockchain is being eliminated. Moreover, a transfer via Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain carries an FX conversion disadvantage, a double-whammy. Here is how MoneyGram depicted its use of Ripple/XRP rail during their partnership in 2019-2021:

Instead of converting money directly between two highly-traded currencies, dollars and pesos, MoneyGram was buying and selling out of obscure crypto. Because of XRP’s relatively tiny trading volume, its FX margins were naturally much higher than with fiat currencies, and, again, those margins have to be paid twice. The same higher FX margins are the case for all cryptocurrencies and exchanges:

Ref_Rates_1_Edited

Here is how HelloBit’s co-founder and CEO Ali Goss summarized this conundrum in the insightful article by Bitcoin Magazine:

“With bitcoin, you’re adding a third currency,” Goss said. “You go from U.S. dollar to bitcoin, and then from bitcoin to whatever the local currency is. You’re adding an extra FX move right there alone. That increases friction. On top of that, small startups don’t have a big FX department, and they don’t have the big abilities that come with such a department … they’re generating more costs for themselves, not less.”

The spreads are so high that even die-hard crypto cross-border players are using non-blockchain rails to complete transfers for those destinations. Yes, you heard this right, EVERY so-called Bitcoin/blockchain money transfer startup pays banks to process a large portion, sometimes a majority, of its cross-border transfers. Here is ZipZap in this interview with CoinDesk:

“ZipZap uses a combination of traditional (Swift) bank payment rails and blockchain technologies to find the least expensive and most efficient transfer option…”

But why would MoneyGram use Ripple/XRP and lose money on a more expensive extra FX conversion that it has to perform twice?! More on this later, but in 2019, MoneyGram was desperate for cash, so it allowed Ripple to buy 10% of the company while paying $40 million annually to create a perception of XRP liquidity in Mexico. Here is how Moneygram described the partnership to investors:

Therefore, instead of disrupting cross-border players or at least helping them serve the unbanked, crypto/blockchain players are using those firms to prop up their own printing press. Any PR is good PR as long as more naive consumers buy a novel cryptocurrency that has no intrinsic value otherwise. Now, you can also begin to appreciate why, during those years, Facebook leadership and their Silicon Valley friends were looking at the Ripple scheme and wanted to join in on the action by launching Libra/Diem.

In 2023, Coinbase still promoted its cross-border money transfers as having no fee to send/receive and instant availability:

Well, the majority of remittance senders do not hold their money in cryptocurrencies initially, and the users on the receiving end have even less demand for crypto. How did Coinbase facilitate cash-out, and what is the FX markup that receiving customers pay for this service? In this regard, Coinbase entered into a partnership with Remitly, one of the largest players in digital remittances. Here is how Remitly’s CEO characterized the arrangement in 2022:

Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain can dramatically reduce remittance prices

Most of the potential savings for international money transfers could be realized today, immediately, IF ONLY senders stop going to cash agents and spend 3 minutes linking their bank accounts on their smartphones using their existing providers like Western Union or Ria Money Transfer. Not understanding why so many senders continue spending 2-3 times more while having a bank account and a smartphone will likely lead to many disappointments for the next generations of Bitcoin-crypto-blockchain-based money transfer startups (read our analysis of the fundamental difference in the behavior of senders from the US to India vs. Mexico).

Examples of past disappointments are common- see the “Graveyard” section toward the end of this article or read these insights from Bitcoin entrepreneurs. But still, too many Bitcoin remittance stakeholders keep repeating an outdated adage about a high markup charged by “traditional” providers and that a Bitcoin solution is 250x cheaper:

Pantera Capital Investor Newsletter - September 2015
Pantera Capital Investor Newsletter – September 2015

Here is another typical comparison from March 2019, highlighting the advantages of free and immediate remittances offered by blockchain startups in contrast to the slower and costlier services provided by traditional fiat-based firms. However, these articles consistently fail to explain why, despite having such advantages and significant marketing capital, as well as numerous pilot projects with established companies, none of these crypto remittance players have been able to demonstrate impressive transaction volumes, except in cases of partnerships involving paid transactions, such as Ripple with MoneyGram.

Comparison of blockchain and regular startups April 2019

Similar claims were made by the short-lived Facebook venture, Libra/Diem. After facing challenges in scaling the P2P payments business at Facebook through traditional means, David Marcus, the head of payments, established a blockchain-based business. Recognizing the difficulties of obtaining government permission to issue currency, Libra/Diem sought political cover by asserting that their primary goal was to assist the billions of unbanked individuals with their remittance needs. However, it remains uncertain how much they truly understood about remittances at that stage. Here was what David Marcus said in late 2019:

You be the judge if such ignorance was unintentional or if Facebook was shamelessly using the world’s poorest to make a quick buck. A similar lack of understanding has been prevalent among Fintech experts. Here was Chris Skinner on a Breaking Banks podcast in 2017 (starts at 32:45):

“Now using companies like Abra a US citizen could send someone in Philippines a hundred dollars with hardly any commission taken off, compared to 25% or more being taken by traditional players.”

How much did that transfer cost at the time? 2-4%:

Comparison or providers - USA to Philippines, $100, bank-to-bank, April 2019
Comparison of providers – USA to Philippines, $100, bank-to-bank, April 2019

By checking the price comparison sites for major remittance corridors, one could quickly discover that the weighted average global margins of top incumbents have been falling to around 3% for Ria Money Transfer, Intermex, and MoneyGram and 4% for Western Union:

So why are we still seeing so many articles about the high costs of sending money internationally? Because it was the case in the past, and it is hard to change our mindset to a fundamentally different input. As usually happens, high margins attracted more competition and prices dropped dramatically. For larger amounts, the average global price is below 5% and for informed consumers, it is 3%:

Source: https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/resources

Moreover, there is a huge difference in prices of remittances across top outbound countries:

Source: WorldBank

Most of the world’s most expensive corridors originate from South Africa and Tanzania. If Bitcoin-crypto-blockchain startups care so much about the high prices of remittances, do you know why they haven’t opened offices in those countries?

Source: WorldBank

Such data is hard to gather and maintain, so the real prices might be even lower as it was discovered in 2016:

South Africa to Zimbabwe $200 WB data vs. Independent
Source: Finmark

What is causing South Africa to have outbound remittance prices many times more expensive than from a country like Russia? Most experts would claim that it is due to two issues, de-risking by banks and exclusive partnership with retailers by Western Union and MoneyGram:

“A major barrier to reducing remittance costs is de-risking by international banks, when they close the bank accounts of money transfer operators, in order to cope with the high regulatory burden aimed at reducing money laundering and financial crime. This has posed a major challenge to the provision and cost of remittance services to certain regions.”

“… the core issue with WU is their exclusivity clauses that have been used for decades to successfully lock markets to one provider, who can then increase their mark-up fees as there is no alternative.”

Neither of these reasons is the case. It is easy to blame ‘banks’ or ‘Western Union,’ but the real root causes are 1) opaque and corrupt governments with regulations that favor banks over Money Transfer Operators (MTOs), 2) consumers who don’t care to shop around, and 3) incumbents who are content with maintaining their market share status quo. In the former Soviet Union region, these constraints don’t exist when it comes to remittances, resulting in lower margins, with Golden Crown being the market leader across many countries, including Kazakhstan. See the proof in the table below – some company names are in Cyrillic, but you can probably guess their English names too.

More relevant for Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain-based remittance providers, whose customers tend to be tech-savvy early adopters, the margins for online remittance in top corridors are in the 1-3% range. For example, in the world’s most advanced corridor, USA-to-India (see reasons in this SaveOnSend article), many providers don’t charge any fees for digital transfers and their FX markups are typically around 0.5-1%:

India FX Markup April 2 2019

Or let’s review the FX markups for another world’s top-10 corridor, USA-to-China – for 6 months in 2016, Western Union was charging ZERO, no fees or FX markup, for sending money online, from-to the linked bank accounts. In 2019, Ria Money Transfer even had a negative FX markup to its customers, i.e., they were offering customers a higher exchange rate than on an interbank market:

China FX Markup April 2 2019

In other words, in some corridors, providers have been subsidizing customers to use their services:

MGI-CEO-on-negative-FX-Q1-2019

It is true that the digital service from Western Union and Wise is not free and not always instant, so if Blockchain-based providers could offer their services for free AND in real-time, they would have an advantage… as long as their investors don’t mind a business model with a negative variable margin.

Some Bitcoin/blockchain remittance startups claimed that they were offering such services:

zebpay-misleading-comparison-of-remittances-from-usa-to-india

But hiding behind a small font was a misleading comparison between sending money with a popular, easily verifiable fiat-to-fiat method and a transaction originating in Bitcoin with no mention of a Bitcoin-to-fiat spread. On top of that spread, Bitcoin providers were charging increasingly higher fees (source here):

Bitcoin txn fee 2017 YTD till July 10

The fee volatility got so bad that in October 2017, Bitspark, one of the more prominent B2B providers of Bitcoin money transfers, switched away to another blockchain.

Since 90% of remittances are still received in cash, could consumers save money by receiving cash from Bitcoin/crypto ATMs? Nope, it is even more expensive:

Source: Coin ATM Radar

As mentioned before, some of the world’s largest remittance corridors allow for the same currency transfers, for example, USD-to-USD from the US to the Philippines or China. This naturally eliminates a need for a provider to manage FX volatility and leads to very attractive pricing for consumers:

Comparison of providers: money transfers from USA to Philippines, USD to USD, $500, bank-to-bank; January, 1, 2018
Comparison of providers: money transfers from USA to Philippines, USD to USD, $500, bank-to-bank; January 1, 2018

On the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous tiny ($1-5 million in annual volume) corridors, especially in intra-Africa, with obviously very little competition and, hence, much higher margins.  The smaller the corridor the less likely is the return on building localized digital capabilities. That is why, the largest digital cross-border money transfer player, Wise, was available from ~30 countries outbound and ~50 countries inbound by 2023. Western Union only enabled digital transfers from less than 40% of its worldwide destinations, 75 outbound countries, by 2020.

But Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain startups are different, right? Unlike the profit-maximizing Western Union or expats-oriented Wise, these startups were started to help those in need who get overlooked by the large existing providers:

American Banker article on Bridge21 April 7 2017
Source: https://www.americanbanker.com/news/remittance-startup-uses-bitcoin-as-a-bridge-between-bank-accounts

So which desperate Sub-Saharan Africans did Bridge21 decide to help first? None. Since 2017, the startup has been targeting well-off customers in the world’s largest and one of the most saturated corridors, USA-to-Mexico, where a margin for such service is 1-3%:

Mexico FX Markup April 2 2019

Most of the facts in this article have been well-known since 2016, and yet shockingly, every year there are new Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain startups that don’t want to understand the difference between a lab experiment in the metaverse and why remittances function in a certain way in the real world.

Quick aside: Mobile Money

Separately from crypto, there is a narrow case of “mobile money,” a term that typically implies that money is paid from a customer account with his/her telecom provider. Despite being piloted by Western Union in 2007, mobile money payments remain a tiny portion of global remittances. They are mostly used for transfers to a few African countries like Kenya and Tanzania.

It took off in those countries due to inadequate bank-card infrastructure for payments. The most famous example is M-Pesa launched in 2007 by Vodafone. Many experts mistakenly believe that M-Pesa helped poor Kenyans with financial inclusion. In reality, the banking industry in Kenya was already rapidly expanding and well-off consumers just had one more convenient option for sending money.

Source: FRED

Remittance volumes among those countries in Africa tend to be relatively small and are, thus, outside of focus for digital expansion by incumbents or Fintech startups. As a result, a mobile money method could be the most cost-effective option for these corridors when compared to cash-to-cash sending:

average-remittances-cost-intraafrica-cash-vs-mobile
Source: GSMA

… Back to Bitcoin/Crypto/Blockchain

Another argument in favor of Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain’s ability to reduce remittance costs is to focus on small transfer amounts. The underlying assumption is that such transfers would then dramatically increase in quantity, i.e., if it costs little to send $10 to a homeland, lots of migrants will begin initiating lots of small transfers. While some increase in smaller amount transfers has been expected (read this interview with Western Union’s executive), there is no evidence of a major trend. Even for smaller amounts, some mainstream providers are not charging any fee, in essence, creating variable-only pricing based only on the FX markup (see top three rows in the table below). With those providers, it already costs less than $1 to send money, so even if a Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain transfer was free the price advantage wouldn’t be enough for consumers to care:

Comparison or providers - USA to Philippines, $20, bank-to-bank, April 2019
Comparison of providers – USA to Philippines, $20, bank-to-bank, April 2019

The last hope for Bitcoin’s differentiation with small transfer amounts ended in 2021 when SWIFT launched a dedicated product for that use case.

Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain can dramatically reduce correspondent banking cost

But if a direct-to-consumer service can’t be differentiated by Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain startups, could they be more successful as a B2B provider? Could they offer a back-end rail to the traditional money transfer operators with a significant advantage over their correspondent banking provider?

In 2015, Western Union denied rumors started by Ripple about a joint pilot. Three years later, in 2018, Western Union’s stock price jumped 10% on a similar rumor:

WU stock Ripple Jan till Jan 11 2018

While Western Union didn’t pursue the partnership with Ripple, MoneyGram stepped in the same week in 2018, signing up for a pilot:

“The current model for these payments requires money transfer companies to use pre-funded accounts across the globe to source liquidity.  Newer blockchain technologies have the potential to revolutionize this process and optimize capital deployment.”

source: Ripple and MoneyGram Partner to Modernize Payments, January 11, 2018

As a result, MoneyGram’s stock jumped around 10% on that day:

MG stock Ripple 5 days Jan 11 2018

How would such a service work? A typical pitch of a Bitcoin/crypto/blockchain startup includes a picture like the one you could see below. It shows a multi-step process for customers (retail or business) who want to transfer money internationally. It then naturally proposes a blockchain-based solution that eliminates the need for all intermediaries letting consumers and businesses interact with each other directly as they do via email:

SWIFT presentation on digital disruption September 2015

Even while only planning a pilot with Stellar, the head of blockchain initiative in a large Indian bank was already describing the key benefits in this article:

“This technology is enabling us to conduct business a lot quicker, cheaper with lower error rates and lower vulnerability to cyber threats. It is helping us eradicate the need for post transaction settlements which are cumbersome and expensive.”

But why, after all this time, do Stellar, Ripple, OKLink, and all other blockchain B2B providers remain so small? Even among non-blockchain B2B cross-border “disruptors,” there has not been a single player with intriguing prospects. After 20 years, Earthport’s revenue was below $50 million when it was acquired by Visa in 2019. After 15 years, CurrencyCloud’s revenue was below $100 million in 2019, when it was also acquired by Visa. 

While seemingly intuitive and simple, two conditions would need to be met for a blockchain or fiat-based B2B solution to present a significant cost advantage over SWIFT: a) the total cost of the back-end rail needs to be a substantial component of a provider’s P&L, AND b) the existing providers are deploying those processes in a substantially inefficient manner.

Let’s review the financial statements of publicly-traded consumer remittance companies.

Western Union 10K 2014
Western Union 10K 2014

It becomes apparent that most of their costs are related to payments for receiving and discharging funds from-to customers, customer acquisition, channel infrastructure, customer service, and risk-management-compliance, not to recording transactions or moving money internationally (read this SaveOnSend article for more details). Hence, providers are eagerly looking for more cost-effective ways to collect and distribute funds vis-a-vis customers, acquire customers, deploy offline and online channels, service customers, and manage risks of releasing funds before getting paid… not functions where Bitcoin seems to be offering a distinctive cost advantage. For example, Western Union spent HALF of all expenses in 2014 on “agent commissions” – whether the underlying currency is fiat or bitcoin wouldn’t seem to make any difference.

Or, let’s consider fraud-related expenses – the major issue in the remittance industry, like the case of “employee impersonation” at Xoom or when people lie about 1) having sufficient funds in their bank account or 2) not sending money or when hackers take over online accounts. Again, it is not clear why a Bitcoin-based provider would be much better at preventing such “front-end” fraud unless it is a so-called “full Bitcoin” transfer (no on- and off-ramp conversion with fiat). This will be indeed a potentially safer infrastructure, but a very slim chance of mass adoption unless we start seeing billions of dollars spent on PR & Marketing globally. More than 20% of Western Union’s workforce is dedicated to compliance mostly to oversee 550,000 cash agents, but its digital arm performs most of such compliance functions automatically.

And what do large remittance providers spend on correspondent banking? As we describe in this SaveOnSend article, it costs them 0.01-0.1% of revenues and is managed by a global team of 2-5 people. What would you guess is the whole pre-funding amount for MoneyGram? Around $35 million:

MoneyGram Cash Held On hand and at institutions Dec 31 2016
Source: Moneygram

Compare that with their compliance and risk management activities which involve 10-20% of the total company staff. If in the next 10 years, a Blockchain solution replaces SWIFT, it could unlock about $500 million of value annually for providers. Hopefully, they will pass half of that gain to 250 million migrants who send money home, every 2 dollars helps.

Nevertheless, by 2017 most of the large financial institutions and government financial entities were busy experimenting with various distributed ledger technologies, on Blockchain or via more private variants. Such a test-first-think-later approach had no positive surprises (examples here, here). Insufficient processing speed, low grade of security, and malfunctioning technology were normal for early tests of any new network:

“One of the main lessons from this experiment is that the versions of distributed ledger currently available may not provide an overall net benefit when compared with existing centralized systems for interbank payments. Core wholesale payment systems function quite efficiently…” 

A seminal moment in the Blockchain-for-back-end debate came in March 2018 when a famed economist, Nouriel Roubini, published “The Blockchain Pipe Dream” which included the following paragraph:

“Bitcoin is a slow, energy-inefficient dinosaur that will never be able to process transactions as quickly or inexpensively as an Excel spreadsheet. Ethereum’s plans for an insecure proof-of-stake authentication system will render it vulnerable to manipulation by influential insiders. And Ripple’s technology for cross-border interbank financial transfers will soon be left in the dust by SWIFT, a non-blockchain consortium that all of the world’s major financial institutions already use. Similarly, centralized e-payment systems with almost no transaction costs – Faster Payments, AliPay, WeChat Pay, Venmo, Paypal, Square – are already being used by billions of people around the world.”

By the second half of 2018, some incumbents began canceling their blockchain pilots. Here is the reasoning from Citi’s Head of Innovation Lab (source here):

“If we are talking about cross-border payments, how many banks do we have across the world – and how many of them are already on-boarded on SWIFT? And how long has it taken SWIFT to onboard all those banks?” 

The disappointing announcements continued in 2019. Here is a typical conclusion from the experiment launched by the Bundesbank together with Deutsche Boerse in 2016 and terminated in late 2018 (source here):

“The blockchain solutions did not fare better in every way: the process took a bit longer and resulted in relatively high computational costs,” Weidmann said in Frankfurt on Wednesday. “Similar experiences have been made elsewhere in the financial sector. Despite numerous tests of blockchain-based prototypes, a real breakthrough in application is missing so far.”

Bitcoin/Blockchain money transfer will destroy Western Union

Obsession with crushing Western Union seems to be a huge distraction for many crypto startups as they struggle to gain even 1% of market share in any remittance corridor. To put things into perspective, among fiat-based fintechs, only Wise, after more than a decade, has been able to catch up to Western Union’s transfer volume. All others remain far behind:

The biggest rumor so far was the story from Rebit and Bloom in 2016 about a 20% market share in the Korea-to-Philippines corridor in 2016. It implied $1-2 million in monthly transfer volume among the biggest Bitcoin providers in those days, Sentbe and Payphil. Keep in mind, this particular corridor from Korea, with an overall annual transfer volume of $0.2-0.3 billion, was tiny in comparison to the top source countries for remittances into the Philippines:

Top 5 remittance source countries for Philippines
Source: Pew

Even such a relatively small volume seemed unlikely as the central bank of the Philippines estimated the volume of remittance transactions involving ALL inbound corridors and ALL virtual currencies to be around $2 million per month at that time. The claims of “20% market share” were continuously re-printed after the first appearance in September 2016, always with no evidence. In public and private interactions, SaveOnSend repeatedly asked all these startups to send us data for validation, and we are still waiting…

Eventually, the Philippines Central Bank began providing estimates of the crypto volumes for inbound remittances. By 2018, it was $8.77 million (or 0.03%) while Payphil was no longer in business.

For a while, it was common to misinform the general public about Western Union, suggesting they charged 10% for limited transfer amounts and only in the US:

Money transfer - Western Union vs Bitcoin
Money transfer – Western Union vs Bitcoin

In the meantime, Western Union has proven to be quite agile in its digital evolution. It was the first to provide an online channel in 2001, the first to experiment with mobile money in 2007, and the first among well-known remittance providers to invest in blockchain startups and experiment with blockchain:

As you saw in the previous comparison tables, Western Union is at times less expensive than some of the so-called Fintech startups (see this SaveOnSend article for more on that topic). For example, look at the margins across providers in one of the world’s most competitive and largest corridors, USA-to-India:

Comparison of Providers - USA-to-India, $1,500, bank-to-bank, March 17 2018
Comparison of Providers – USA-to-India, $1,500, bank-to-bank, March 17 2018

And that may be the biggest “blind spot” of Blockchain-based startups. They have an image, wishful thinking, of Western Union as a cash-only business that missed telephony and kept hanging onto the telegraph. The reality is quite different. Western Union would exploit Bitcoin-blockchain rails as soon as they become a viable alternative. Remember, profits and costs are in the first and last mile, not in the rails (read this SaveOnSend article for more details). Finally, while Western Union’s market share and stock price have been slowly declining, there are yet no signs of imminent demise:

The only reason preventing mass Blockchain/Bitcoin money transfer adoption is [enter your favorite]

Articles like this highlight something unique about stakeholders in a crypto money transfer community, both startup founders and their investors. Rather than learning and embracing the challenging reality of consumer remittances today, they prefer to believe that Blockchain by itself is a “game-changer” for remittances. They are betting on a miracle of new technology taking off once enough remittance consumers hear about its features.

What would drive such mass awareness has, over the years, been some “game-changing” event; pick your favorite:

  • Donald Trump becomes president and halts all remittances for undocumented migrants from Mexico.
  • An economic collapse in a large country results in hyperinflation (Greece, Venezuela).
  • A large retailer agrees to accept Bitcoin for money transfers.
  • Bitcoin remittance startup cuts its fees and conversion rates to zero.
  • Low-income consumers learn to use advanced smartphones.
  • The government supports the adoption of Bitcoin (El Salvador).

Rather than asking why NO ONE is using crypto for legally sending money cross-border, including their neighbors, families, and friends, the payment industry pundits prefer to wonder about poor people in mysterious Africa (read more here):

“Potentially, Africa’s huge unbanked population combined with the burdensome process of opening and operating a bank account should make Bitcoin an instant hit. However, its adoption has been irritatingly slow even though the basic infrastructure is not missing. It is estimated that by the end of this decade that 80 percent of the continent’s more than 1.2 bln population would be using Smartphones. Then what hinders Bitcoin penetration in Africa?…”

Crypto’s adoption in other use cases

The lack of any noticeable Bitcoin adoption is a sobering reality 15 years after the release of Version 0.1. It is evident across all regions and use cases, not just remittances. Are you old enough to remember the exuberance in 2014 when thousands of merchants agreed to accept Bitcoin? But 3 years later, in 2017, the verdict was in:

  • CheapAir.com: “…it certainly hasn’t taken off…”
  • Dish Network: “…we have not seen growing enthusiasm…”

There were still some merchant processors reporting amazing growth. Here were the headlines from BitPay’s report on achievements in 2017:

  • on pace to process over $1B annually in bitcoin payment acceptance and payouts, and we’ve already grown our payments dollar volume 328% year-over-year from 2016
  • NewEgg has more than doubled its bitcoin sales from last year
  • seen a more than doubling in transactions going to Latin American merchants since August of last year
  • US card program alone grew by 1583% year over year (from August 2016)


Looks impressive, right? Except, notice that BitPay conveniently did not mention either a base for comparison or a number of active customers and transactions. Dollar volume growth of 300+% would be impressive for a regular merchant processor. For a Bitcoin-based provider, when Bitcoin value has grown 1,000-2,000% in the previous year, such “growth” number seems more like a loss. By 2018, any optimism was gone despite lower fees (source here):

Bitcoin Volume with USA Merchants Aug 2018

While the crypto impact has been invisible for legal money transfers, e-commerce, or in-store purchases, several use cases represent a lion’s share of all usage.

  • Legal but with no intrinsic value: 1) investing in cryptocurrency, 2) trading on discrepancies in prices across exchanges.
  • Illegal but with intrinsic value: 3) ransomware, 4) money laundering, 5) tax evasion, 6) Ponzi schemes.

By definition, no one can know the volume of illegal cross-border transfers/payments. One of the most prominent industry experts, Hugo Cuaves-Mohr, estimated it in the $150-200 billion range. For a 10-15% premium, tax evaders buy Bitcoin for cash in countries like India and China, then sell it on exchanges in a developed country (Bitstamp or Kraken), and deposit laundered money in that country. Because of Blockchain/Bitcoin’s widespread role in money laundering and tax evasion, the US tax authority (IRS) requested the names of Coinbase customers in late 2016 and won the case in court in late 2017.

Until the death of its founder in 2018, a clear leader among Ponzi schemes was MMM claiming 250 million users in 118 countries, 3 million in Nigeria alone. MMM accomplished it while hiding from governments, with cheap websites and an offline agent network. Watch this short video and ask yourself why not a single crypto startup for cross-border money transfers has been able to accomplish 0.1% of the MMM scale:

Even more grounded Blockchain/Bitcoin supporters felt it was reasonable to compare Bitcoin with Skype, WhatsApp, and other world’s biggest consumer platforms:

Bitcoin Bank meme

The irony of the above meme (created in early 2016 and resurrected in late 2017) is that no one who seriously shared it was using Bitcoin as their primary bank. Why? They seem to forget the two most basic principles behind the success of any innovation:

  • A manifestation of product-service virality takes weeks-months, not years. WhatsApp and other “viral” giants spread like fire to millions of users and didn’t require second-guessing. Nothing even remotely close has been transpiring with ANY crypto apps, and the active user base of the ones focused on remittances is typically measured in hundreds.
  • The happier consumers are with their existing choices and the more work required from them to adopt, the more branding and marketing efforts have to happen by crypto providers to initiate said adoption. They should also embrace the harsh implication that an abundance of satisfactory options impedes adoption not only among customers but also among necessary business partners. Why would a grocery store engage with a brand new provider that has a minuscule remittance flow if they already have a satisfactory working relationship with Western Union and other well-known brands? Read how CEOs-founders of Bitcoin remittance startups described this particular challenge BitSpark, Abra, and Rebit.

El Salvador’s failure with Bitcoin for remittances

So the biggest barrier to mass adoption might be that the crypto community is still lacking skeptical practitioners who would consider a new payment rail and cryptocurrency to be just another novelty and know how to win against the headwinds. But time and time again, the execution is lacking. When El Salvador embraced Bitcoin as legal tender and encouraged remittance users to switch from their existing providers in 2021, here was the quality of the official Bitcoin wallet:

Even more shocking was the reaction from crypto heavyweights. For a decade, they have been dreaming about governments not impeding the adoption of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. El Salvador moved beyond anyone’s wildest dreams by paying citizens to download a Bitcoin wallet and pressuring merchants to accept it. Has any major player opened an office in El Salvador, moved there, pitched in with marketing to persuade Salvadorans in the US to send remittances via this new rail, or assigned their best developers to improve Chivo wallet? Nope.

The results were predictably disappointing, with Bitcoin remittances in decline since their launch in 2021, falling to around 1% of monthly volume:

Instead of a hands-on attitude in seizing this opportunity of a lifetime, we keep hearing from idealists who are stuck in the “Bitcoin=Internet” paradigm. Whether it is a new brand of vodka, clothes, car, or remittances, the real “game-changer” is in superb execution of a more-or-less standard playbook. Miracles are known for tardiness.

Specific examples of Bitcoin money transfer providers

Graveyard – closed or pivoted away from cross-border consumer money transfers:

  • October 2020: Rebit.ph shuts down after raising $100K in 2015. It generated around 100 daily transactions making money on the FX-Bitcoin spread. Read this article from its former insider.
  • October 2017: Bitspark pivots to B2B (investors: RGAx), shuts down completely in March 2020
  • July 2016: Freemit shuts down (investors: Alchemist Accelerator)
  • January 2016: Romit shuts down (investors: 500 Startups, AltaIR Capital)
  • November 2015: BitPesa pivots to B2B (investors before pivot: DCG, Pantera).
    • Launched in 2013, BitPesa initially was the best-known “use case” for Bitcoin consumer remittances to a few countries in the middle part of Africa. However, as BitPesa kept struggling to gain traction among consumer remittance users, it discovered that its typical early adopter was a small business owner who occasionally sent money.
    • Facing this reality and struggling in the initial outbound market, the UK, BitPesa expanded its marketing efforts to potential senders from other countries like Canada and the USA and began targeting B2B cross-border payments (see an informative presentation by BitPesa’s CEO).
    • BitPesa has raised close to $2M initially and its transfer volume was growing at 30%/month from $50K in January 2015 reaching $400K by July. As of November 2015, nearly all of its customers were using BitPesa for business needs.
  • October 2015: Bitstake->NairaEx
  • August 2015: Beam shuts down (investors: MTT Group)
  • July 2015: Cryptosigma->Toast (investors before pivot: Startupbootcamp)
  • June 2015: 37Coins shuts down (investors: 500 Startups)
  • April 2015: Buttercoin shuts down (investors: Google Ventures, Y Combinator)
  • 2015: HelloBit shuts down (investors: 500 Startups)

Abra (A Better Remittance App) deserves special mention in this section.
When, on September 10th, 2015, Abra announced that it had raised $12 million in funding, it marked a seminal moment for Bitcoin’s evolution in remittances. For the first time, there was a startup with enough funds to acquire 100,000+ remittance customers. This made Bitcoin for remittances no longer a hypothetical question. We were finally able to compare Abra’s progress with the initial trajectories of established remittance startups:

  • TransferWise: raised $7 million in its first 2.5 years, reaching $35M in monthly transfer volumes
  • WorldRemit: raised $7 million in its first 4 years, reaching $50M in monthly transfer volumes
  • Remitly: raised $11 million in its first 3 years, reaching $2M in monthly transfer volumes

By August 2017, two years later, Abra had only 73 users a day…

Abra’s vision was indeed groundbreaking: enabling consumers to act as ATMs to eventually replace hawala and catalyze a faster shift from offline to online methods of sending money. Abra was not looking to modify the behavior of end-users; it aimed to enable a cash-to-cash method habitual for 90% of remittance transactions at the time. The fact that Bitcoin was somehow involved was also purposely hidden from consumers, not apparent.

Abra was launched in February 2015 with a fascinating premise, but a comical-borderline-bizarre pitch. At that point, it was hard to imagine a better parody of the disconnect between Bitcoin’s ardent fans and the reality of money transfers than this presentation and the follow-up reaction. Please watch it, only 6 minutes:

This pitch won the 2015 “LAUNCH Festival” Award. Moreover, the Abra app was hailed as the finally arrived “Uber for remittances” and “Western Union killer.” If you were not inside the Bitcoin bubble, you could be forgiven for chuckling a few times while watching the video. Abra’s presentation started with: “I wanna talk to you about a Mexican immigrant named Bill” and proceeded with painting us a story of the human suffering of someone in Mexico who has to “drive 2.5 hours” to the nearest cash agent. Abra had a solution for those greatly inconvenienced folks: “human teller.”

Considering the ubiquity of cash agents, it is not hard to imagine a place that is so remote. There are numerous small villages, with 50-100 residents, in such hard-to-reach places that remain there for historical rather than economic reasons. For anyone who ventures to such villages, a few gaps become apparent in Abra’s presentation: a) Mobile data connectivity, which could be spotty even around large cities, is usually non-existent once you are this far from larger cities and infrastructure; there is just no business case for deploying such capabilities. b) Comfort and trust in technology, especially as it relates to money, are far behind in their evolution. c) While it is usually very safe to live in those communities, the overall protection coverage by the government is quite limited.

There might be a segment that could be eager early adopters: criminals. There was finally an app for them to quickly identify somebody with money in the vicinity and thus significantly improve the effectiveness of victim targeting.

Thief

However, investors who gave Abra $12 million were not inclined to waste money by targeting remote villages. Helping the “poor” is a good PR, but like all other Fintech startups, Abra was also going after tech-savvy consumers in major metropolitan areas of top global remittance corridors. It quickly became apparent that “P2P” was also just PR. Most of Abra’s distribution in the Philippines was not through “human tellers” but through the same pawn shops used by traditional remittance providers.

From the beginning, there was also an obvious question about Abra’s ability to make a profit, considering that they charged 0.5% on each side of a transfer, assuming all FX risk. At that point, Bitcoin spreads were high, and hedging was very hard to find; hence, it was quite expensive (Bitcoin mining businesses in developing countries were already looking for the same hedge). If we add Abra’s own gross margin and each side’s markup of 1%, the total margin gets to around 3%, which was on the high end for corridors like USA-to-Philippines:

Philippines FX Markup April 2 2019

Abra started by trying to sign up thousands of “human tellers.” The startup’s initial focus was on the USA-Philippines corridor, which was in the bull’s eye of all traditional players and fintechs. Just nine months after getting funded, Abra pivoted to a very different offering: a typical Bitcoin wallet focusing on consumers with linked bank accounts and offering cash-out via convenience stores. Here is how Abra’s founder explained that pivot a couple of years later, in 2018:

“People were starting to use the tellers to actually buy bitcoin,” Barhydt said. “Our customers [were] pulling us to basically become an investment vehicle…

Sixteen months after a $12 million funding round, Abra all but gave up on its original pitch. It focused almost exclusively on a wallet play and pitched it as global domination:

In the end, Abra’s initial focus on remittances became a repeat of another venture in the same space, Boom Financial. Founded in 2008 by Abra’s management, Boom was pitched as “the first cross-border mobile banking service in the US” (on a side note, same as claimed in 2012 by Remitly). Over 2008-2012, Boom raised $28 million from RRE Ventures and others, and… nothing.

Out of all the failed Bitcoin remittance startups, Abra’s pivot was the most disappointing. On paper, its target segment and user experience were distinctive and had the promise of making a real change for a large portion of cash remittance users. Instead, Abra became another mundane wallet app for better-off consumers with bank accounts. In just 2 years, Abra’s focus changed from helping “Mexican named Bill” with cheap remittances to helping affluent American Express cardholders invest in Bitcoin for a 4% fee:

Abra and Amex Email Aug 2017
Source: Abra email marketing, August 1st, 2017

In October 2017, Abra raised $16 million to offer credit installments. Here is how Abra’s founder explained their failure in cross-border transfers:

Abra Feb 2018 on stopping remittances
Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Still Active B2C Startups:

bridge21

The startup, bridge21, was launched in January 2017, targeting the world’s largest remittances corridor: USA-to-Mexico. It tried capitalizing on the difference in Bitcoin pricing between the USA and Mexico, at times offering a below interbank exchange rate, surpassing all competitors:

bridge21 faced challenges in its early years due to issues with the banking provider and the global decline in Bitcoin liquidity. As a result, transfer volumes did not increase significantly. However, it’s worth noting that bridge21 was the only Bitcoin/Blockchain startup globally that initially shared its revenue, although it stopped doing so after early 2019:

Other interesting startups to follow:

Regulatory aspect of using Bitcoin for money transfer

Judges

Compliance with KYC-AML regulations poses an existential question for crypto remittances. Even for fiat-based transfers, banks are routinely cutting off small remittance providers and expressing serious concerns about doing business with even the largest players. A senior banker described reasons why their bank wouldn’t open a correspondent account for a crypto-based provider of remittances:

“Our bank is careful NOT to aggressively address new frontiers given potentially high penalties or even simply being in a penalty box by regulators. Concerns are obviously similar to those with regular providers of remittances: money  laundering, gambling, drugs, or within other prohibited industries. Unfortunately, I don’t see a path forward in the near term: we won’t be able to monitor or control their flows even if we were to hire more people in compliance or invested more in the systems.”

Read this article on whether such compliance is even feasible. Faisal Khan does a great job discussing various aspects of Bitcoin’s legality and compliance for sending money internationally in his “The Lure of Remittances for Bitcoin Startups” article. Some providers are hoping that if they are MSB-licensed outside the US, they could have an online website and provide money transfers from the US to their country – see Faisal’s response here. Finally, read his step-by-step instructions on how to make Bitcoin international money transfer compliant.

For Bitcoin regulations in the US, state-by-state, read here.

Overall, it is understandable why a cross-border remittance provider requires more scrutiny than a company in a lending space like Lending Club or Affirm. The additional risk of money laundering and terrorism financing might outweigh any potential benefits. At the same time, there is a risk of applying an excessive amount of regulation to this seemingly promising innovation (FinCEN Fines Ripple, Wells Fargo shuts down Bitfinex transfers, “Bitcoin Still Confuses Bankers“).

Simultaneously, the crypto ecosystem must significantly intensify its efforts to combat criminals exploiting this innovative technology. Instead of frequently hearing excuses about anonymity, there should be a proactive termination of criminal activities. Cases of identifying tax evaders among customers by Coinbase, Kraken, and Bitstamp are notably absent.

In the instance of a global Ponzi scheme by MMM, it was technologically feasible to identify and shut down accounts of the scheme participants. This massive scam disproportionately targeted low-income consumers in Africa and South-East Asia. Governments of affected countries took urgent action in response to the Ponzi scheme. Despite the frequent discussion within the crypto community about caring for the less fortunate, there is a question about what specific measures were taken to prevent or address this fraud:

MMM Global Website, April 30, 2016
Source: http://mmmglobal.org/what_is_mmm/, April 30, 2016

In Conclusion: Making crypto money transfer a reality

After 15 years of missed opportunities, the crypto community must acknowledge that frictions in consumer cross-border money transfer have diminished due to a combination of government, bank associations, and fintech efforts. The remaining pain points are limited in scale, and implementing a crypto solution would encounter significant regulatory uncertainty. This doesn’t imply giving up on the market but necessitates making large, concentrated bets with hands-on involvement.

In 2019, Ripple demonstrated that with a quarterly investment of $10 million, they could acquire 20% of the liquidity of the top-3 remittance firms in the world’s largest corridor. Similar arrangements were made with smaller players in the US and Europe. Ripple utilized these artificial measures to encourage consumers to buy XRP and persuade regulators to approve their IPO plans. Some major Bitcoin miners could afford similar liquidity purchases, with top miners potentially joining forces, investing 5-10 times Ripple’s capital, and acquiring equity ownership in major fiat money transfer operators while compensating them for liquidity.

While this approach may sound like socialism and require additional paid lobbyists for SEC approval, top Bitcoin miners already have a viable business model and may not be planning an IPO. However, there’s a recognition that adoption won’t happen otherwise. The long-term vision for crypto-based remittances involves the currency stabilizing in the next decade, paving the way for a new wave of startups promoting Bitcoin as a store of value and investment. Although these startups may burn out, they might set the stage for the mass adoption of Bitcoin which could potentially include a “killer” remittance app.

Bitcoin money transfer - moving cash in China
Bitcoin money transfer – moving cash in China

If you know of a crypto-based remittance provider with substantial volumes, please share details in the comments.

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