Co-Founder and CFO at ZEROBANK - Your Local Currency - Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Since the boom of Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, many pioneers in the crypto market would like to create a new currency to be accepted as a means of payment and use them to trade and transfer cross-border, bypassing any intervention from governments and central banks. So far, although cryptocurrencies have made substantial changes to the global economy, there is very little success for any cryptocurrencies to be widely recognized as "money" per se. It will take more time for cryptocurrencies market to stabilize and figure out how to compete with fiat currencies.In the meantime, the world economy still functions by 164 official national currencies (fiat currencies), and the problem of sending and exchanging between these currencies still present. Only considering non-commercial transactions, the remittance market and money exchange market extract billions of dollars every year from migrants, international students, international tourists, etc. This happens because this market between these hundreds of different currencies depend almost solely on the centralized banking systems and financial organizations.Cryptocurrencies may not replace fiat currencies just yet, but the technology behind them – Blockchain – is what can make the difference in this market. By embracing the concept of an open, distributed global ledger, we created ZeroBank platform based on Blockchain and Smart Contract technologies to help customers in the money transfer and exchange markets reduce service costs substantially, and yet enjoy a secure and verifiable way to make transactions.