Hi Cemil-Hi Jeremy,
You always mention sending/receiving money between people. Looks like your main aim (now) seems to disrupt international money transfer joints like WU. Which could be quite fast if you have enough geographical reach soon.
1-- Do you plan to attach your service to apps like Whatsapp/Fb Messenger/email?
2-- Do you plan to go into store payments in the future, like a digital app version of a bank POS.
Many thanks for being here.
Cemil
Actually, we're not very focused on international money transfer, although for customers in the US who want to send money around the world, there are some good use cases using Circle USD to pay via BTC into a wide range of global exchanges and local digital wallets.
We're primarily focused on helping people pay each other, for personal payments. 95%+ of personal payments are "domestic" and local to a given currency (e.g. USD to USD payments, EUR to EUR, etc.), because most personal payments are built around experiences we are having in our personal life with friends, family, colleagues, service providers, etc. I think like email, SMS, etc., most payments are local, but the system should allow people to have global inter-operability. Email/SMS wouldn't be useful if it was just sending and receiving messages in the United States, even though most of the messages I send are domestic. Likewise, digital payments aren't that interesting if they are bound to one platform / service-provider or geography, they need to be global and inter-operable like other protocols on the internet.
We don't need to have broad geographic reach to create value in the global ecosystem. because we're building on the open network, on the bitcoin blockchain, we can exchange value with people in any country, via regional ecosystem participants like Unocoin (India), Coins.ph/Rebit.ph (Phillippines), BitX (South Africa), BitPesa (Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania), Korbit (Korea), OKCoin, Huboi (China), etc. We do hope that many of these apps and services provide for instant conversion to/from local currencies via BTC, similar to what we've done with USD @ Circle. That would certainly help make this a more seamless experiences for consumers globally.
In terms of connecting to messaging and social platforms, it's an area we're really interested in. The Circle native apps have steadily been adding more features to make payments more like messages, including text, images, emoticons, and other forms of expression. We want people to be able to share those experiences/messages/payments via their established communication channels, whether that be email/SMS/social/URLs etc.
In terms of our focus on merchants and retail PoS, we don't have any plans to get into that area. It seems like an area with a lot of quality companies focused -- BitPay, Coinbase, Bitnet, Stripe, Braintree, Heartland, Ingenico, and so many others. Because the bitcoin network is open, we don't have to try and build and control both sides of the payment ecosystem, and can really focus deeply on consumer problems.
Jeremy
