Why Bitcoin Is Esesntial To Abra’s Global Payments App (And What It Does)

Bill Bardhydt has been trying to solve the problem of mobile money transfers for over a decade and he may have finally found the proper solution in the form of Abra. Even before the development of the famed M-Pesa platform in Kenya, Bardhydt was fascinated with the idea of allowing anyone with a mobile number to send money to any other mobile number in the world.
At American Banker’s recent ‘Blockchains Digital Currencies’ event, Bardhydt explained why Bitcoin has been the missing piece of the puzzle in his quest for the Whatsapp of money transfers.
Eliminating the Middlemen
Bitcoin is well known for its ability to remove third parties from online payments; or at least replace them with a decentralized group of miners who are unable to seize funds. This is the key aspect of Bitcoin that is vital to the success of Abra.
‘I basically decided that if there was any way that you could solve the problem of moving funds between any two phone numbers in the world at global scale, you basically need to eliminate all middlemen from the transaction,’ Bardhydt told American Banker Editor-in-Chief Marc Hochstein at the recent blockchain conference. ‘I realized what I wanted was a model that allowed two people to share a digital asset between them with no middlemen. That’s really hard; especially if the digital asset is supposed to be dollars on one end and pesos or euros on the other end.’

This post was published at Nasdaq on August 17, 2016,.