TL; DR
Full story
The piece of technology we were most looking forward to when we moved from Australia to America?
Venmo.
Sounds weird, and honestly quite anti-climatic – we know!
But that’s having a single payment network all of your friends and family use? It’s a game changer.
We used to have to split checks using bank transfers (Bah!).
Good news for Australians: the banking system eventually saw the opportunity to take over that part of the market and, in its own strange way, became ‘the Venmo of Australia’.
They started by allowing users to text a one-click payment link to their friends (regardless of which bank they used) – and now they’ve implemented their own version of Zelle.
We’re telling you this story because we’re starting to see a similar transition take place in the crypto space.
Specifically: on Basic.
You can now text crypto payment request links to your friends’ phone numbers with one click.
That’s still inconvenient, but it opens the door to a future where users can link their phone numbers to their wallet addresses.
Reducing each user’s ‘ship to’ address from an unreadable string of 42 upper/lower case letters and numbers, for example:
0x1f9080aae28b8a3dceadf281b0f12828e676c326
…to a simple telephone number – something that everyone already has and understands – of no geo-locking.
We’d love to see it!