A Blockchain Remittance Pilot Proves Successful for 100 Migrant Workers in Thailand
A successful blockchain remittance pilot has seen over 100 participating migrant workers transfer money to Myanmar, their homeland, instantly.
Everex , an Asian blockchain startup focused on financial inclusion in the region facilitated transactions totaling over 850,000 Thai baht (approx. $24,000), using its wallet over a blockchain.
The Thailand-based Fintech startup revealed that the successful pilot used the Ethereum blockchain, adding that the remittance transactions incurred no transaction fees for both sending value and currency conversion. Furthermore, transfers went through in under a minute, the Thailand-based blockchain remittance startup noted.
“Overall, the average transaction took less than a minute and recorded savings of over 7% in remittance cost and currency exchange rates,” Everex revealed.
Ultimately, recipients had to use money-changers in Myanmar to switch from “Cryptocash”, its digital token, to local fiat cash. However, the startup underlined that the lack of a centralized entity sees successful cross-border remittance with significantly low costs and near-instantaneous transfers – a far cry from traditional remittance operators.
Cryptocash sees national currencies transacted over the Ethereum blockchain with a 0.27% transaction fee. A single unit of cryptocash is pegged to a single unit of the accompanying national currency. The digital token is stored on the blockchain and is transacted directly between users’ wallets that are powered by Ethereum smart contracts.
Everex claims to be working toward enabling financial services for the world’s BOP (Bottom of the Pyramid) population to enable peer-to-peer transactions among individual users anywhere in the world, via its mobile application.
Blockchain Hotbed
The successful pilot comes during a time when the South East Asian region is seeing significant blockchain and Fintech activity.
Banks are turning toward the technology too, as evident with Singapore’s OCBC, which claims to have completed the first regional use of blockchain technology for remittance earlier this month. Days later, Singapore’s central bank revealed its own plan for a blockchain platform for inter-bank payments in the country, in partnership with New York-based blockchain startup R3.
Further north to Singapore, Indian banking giant ICICI also unveiled its own successful blockchain remittance pilot where money was transferred instantly to a partner bank in Dubai.
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