Cashaa , the London-based p2p marketplace, has announced that the company is preparing to launch its services in India and Nigeria next week.
The formal launch scheduled for January 18 will see the company bring its unique zero-fee cash transfer services to cash senders and recipients in the two countries.
Cashaa’s founder and CEO Kumar Gaurav had last year noted the problem with country-to-country bitcoin remittances. He had explained the hassle of going through the exchanges twice by giving the example of conducting U.S to Ghana remittances, where you have to first change your fiat currency into bitcoin on a U.S. exchange, then send the bitcoin and then use a local exchange in Ghana to convert the bitcoins into Cedi.
He had further added that for the latter, liquidity is a big issue … as there is currently not near enough local demand for bitcoin. Hence, this type of business model has struggled and failed in the past.
Cashaa’s business model tackles such problems as it a peer-to-peer marketplace designed to facilitate the transfer of fiat currencies from sender to recipient in a straightforward manner – and without the fees that many people are now accustomed to paying, unlike many other blockchain-based remittance services in the recent years.
Cashaa’s partnerships with local digital currency traders and exchanges, as well as Bitcoin ATMs, and its cryptocurrency-neutral approach should eventually enable it to function using any digital currency traders prefer.
The end result is a cash remittance service powered by cryptocurrency trading activity – and a new zero-fee money transfer option for consumers in Nigeria and India.
The cryptocurrency aspect to the transaction that happens in the background helps the Cashaa remittance service to offer customers in these nations an opportunity to avoid the challenges they might otherwise confront when dealing with traditional cryptocurrency exchanges.
And going by the information provided by Cashaa, the business model yielded positive results during the testing period. There were more than 10,000 trader sign-ups, and transfers of some $2 million made using the company’s blockchain-powered platform.