More than 100 migrant workers have transferred money instantly over blockchain to their homes in Myanmar in the last months. This marks a successful pilot test for Everex, a company aiming to give financial access to the world’s huge “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BOP) population. Overall, the average transaction took less than a minute and recorded savings of over 7% in remittance cost and currency exchange rates. Everex essentially hands the power to send any amount of money fast and cheap around the world to individual users, wherever they live.
The test is just a small start, but has major significance.
Over 850,000 Thai baht (around $24,000 USD) were transferred using the Everex wallet, a mobile and web based app that sends digitized national currencies using Ethereum blockchain.
With over 500 signed users, mainly in Thailand, the Everex wallet is capable of transferring any custom digital asset over the Ethereum blockchain.
Sending and currency conversion both happened in less than a minute and incurred no transaction fees. Although the test recipients used Myanmar money-changers to switch from CryptoCash back to physical cash, no centralized entity performed the actual remittance. This cuts time and costs dramatically, since the transmission process was automated with programmable smart contracts on Ethereum.
This means powerful financial tools, which have always been the proprietary domain of large financial institutions, are now available to ordinary people everywhere.