NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Bitcoin startups Volabit and SatoshiTango have opened a money transfer service between their respective countries through a collaboration called Coinnect.

Volabit framed the offering as a bitcoin-powered international money bridge for remittances and global commerce that will minimize the bitcoin learning curve.

Bitcoin is hidden from the Coinnect user experience. Those wanting to send money via Coinnect need only deal in their local currencies without worrying about bitcoin’s price volatility.

Volabit co-founder Tomas Alvarez told CoinDesk:

“We believe that bitcoin has huge untapped potential to change international money-sending beyond traditional remittances. Due to the inertia of old habits and trust lacking in new technologies, however, bitcoin services have failed to meaningfully compete against existing services thus far.”

SatoshiTango CEO Matias Bari said that’s because most of bitcoin’s existing use cases impose a large responsibility on the users to understand the technology of the digital currency. Many bitcoin services are marketed to bitcoin’s earliest adopters, leaving the general consumer population overwhelmed by them.

By creating a network of bitcoin businesses that allow fiat-based international transactions, he hopes to foster mainstream adoption.