How Abra's CEO Plans to Make the WhatsApp for Money
*By Tanaya Macheel*
Abra's new investment features that allow users to invest their Bitcoin in traditional stocks and ETFs are the latest step forward for the crypto wallet and exchange to become a global crypto bank, CEO Bill Barhydt told Cheddar Thursday.
"Consumers in Mexico, India, China, Southeast Asia \[and\] parts of Europe are completely shut out of Western investing," Barhydt said. "There’s 100,000 investment accounts in all of Mexico for tens of millions of people. This makes no sense. Our mission is to democratize financial services and we’ve figured out how to do that using this cool crypto blockchain based technology ... it works in 155 countries because we don't have to be some SEC-brokered dealer because of the way this technology works."
Barhydt has been vocal about his vision for Abra to become a kind of crypto bank, where users can act as custodians of their own money, whether it’s Bitcoin or dollars or other crypto and fiat currencies, and whether it’s investing, credit or simply transferring money between two people. Traditional and even upstart digital banks haven’t figured out how to be truly global and borderless, thanks in large part to burdensome regulatory requirements that vary from market to market.
Abra is available in 155 countries and supports the buying, storing, and now investing of 30 cryptocurrencies and 50 fiat currencies. The smart contract platform functioning in the background of Abra’s user interface creates crypto-collateralized contracts that peg Bitcoin to the value of whatever asset the user wants. The concept is a step forward from tokenizing an existing financial asset, which is the extent of innovation for many other crypto companies. This means Abra doesn’t have to be licensed in the markets in which it operates because it doesn’t hold consumer funds — putting users in control of their own funds.
"From the consumer’s perspective they can basically invest in SPDRs, ETFs, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, without actually having to understand the complexity, without actually having to go through the process of buying the security,” Barhydt said.
The minimum investment is five dollars and Abra will waive fees on traditional stocks and ETF investing for the rest of 2019.
Whether consumers are ready for the responsibility of being their own bank remains to be seen. Last week Canada’s QuadrigaCX exchange lost $190 million of customers’ money after its founder, the company's sole employee, died ー taking with him the password to the cold storage in which it was held. While it’s easy to point to shady or scammy behavior from the company, there have been other cases where crypto investors have lost money that was held on centralized exchanges rather than in their own wallets.
But Barhydt believes users are ready to take that leap.
"We believe consumers are ready to effectively take their smartphone and have a WhatsApp for money,” he said. “That’s really our vision: a single smartphone app globally that allows any consumer to do myriad financial services from investing to credit, getting access to instant loans, global money transfer. Our mission is to make that app available to billions of users.”
This almost sounds like Facebook’s blockchain mission to create a stablecoin for WhatsApp money transfers in less developed markets.
Abra plans to unveil new credit products this year and expand the number of markets where consumers can invest. It’s beginning with the Nasdaq.
"We’re on a mission to keep rolling out financial services unit we really have that Whats App for money,” he said.
For full interview [click here](https://www.cheddar.com/media/new-app-lets-you-trade-stocks-and-etfs-using-bitcoin)
Jay Hatfield, Chief Investment Officer at Infrastructure Capital Management, joined Closing Bell to break down the big factors leading to this latest market meltdown, as inflation and an upcoming Fed policy decision affect investor sentiment.
Tech apprenticeship platform Multiverse became a unicorn with a $1.7 billion valuation, after raising $220 million in a Series D round. As companies across the country face challenges in hiring and retaining tech talent, Multiverse says it's trying to offer a solution with a new way to train and hire workers that can serve as an alternative to college and corporate training. Sophie Ruddock, VP and GM North America of Multiverse, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Bitcoin's price has fallen below $24,000, its lowest level since December 2020. Matt Hougan, CIO at Bitwise Asset Management, joined Cheddar News to discuss the future of crypto amid the latest high-profile point of concern, the halting of withdrawals at Celsius Network. "Last month we saw Luna collapse. This month we're seeing Celsius possibly collapsing," he said. "So this stress test is finding weaknesses in the crypto ecosystem and it will continue until we get to a strong foundation from which crypto can recover."
An analyst at JP Morgan is predicting massive future growth for Apple in its music and gaming divisions — to the tune of more than $8 billion in revenue by 2025. Cheddar News anchors Kristen Scholer and Hena Doba discuss the glowing forecast for the tech giant.
Catching you up on today’s top headlines with Bitcoin falling below $24,000, U.S. gas prices reaching above $5 on average, Tesla shareholders voting on a 3-for-1 stock split, and more.
On this episode of On The Job presented by ADP: Gemma Burgess, CEO of Ferguson Partners, explains what people are looking for in an employer, and how to convey positive work culture to potential employees; Amy Leschke-Kahle, Vice President of Performance Acceleration at The Marcus Buckingham Company, an ADP company, breaks down how encouraging employee engagement and empowering employee voices can benefit every workplace and busts a myth about employee engagement while working from home; Jim Huether, CEO of Hyperice, discusses Hyperice's new employee mental health initiative, known as the Workplace Alliance, with 100-plus companies to combat the ongoing mental health crisis and how they're taking a hands-on, data-driven approach to the mental health crisis.
Amy Leschke-Kahle, Vice President of Performance Acceleration at The Marcus Buckingham Company, an ADP company, joins Cheddar to discuss how encouraging employee engagement and empowering employee voices can benefit every workplace and busts a myth about employee engagement while working from home.
Jim Huether, CEO of Hyperice, joins Cheddar to discuss Hyperice's new employee mental health initiative, known as the Workplace Alliance, with 100-plus companies to combat the ongoing mental health crisis and how they're taking a hands-on, data-driven approach to the mental health crisis.
Consumer prices saw an 8.6 percent jump in May, with fuel prices showing the biggest surge, climbing 17 percent last month. As inflation continues to climb to levels not seen in 40 years, President Biden took to calling out ExxonMobil and other major oil companies, accusing them of holding back production while continuing to collect huge profits at the cost of the consumer. Mark Avallone, the president of Potomac Wealth Advisors, joined Cheddar's Opening Bell to discuss. “They have reduced long-term expenditures. But why? Because the world is going to alternative energy and as consumers, if we thought that that welcome change to alternatives was going to happen without pain, we might have been mistaken," he said. "The less investment they make in oil because they're getting ready for a new world of electric vehicles, the less we're going to be prepared for oil shocks such as the one we got when Russia invaded Ukraine."
