If you’ve never sent money to someone across the world using crypto, then it is something I would suggest you must try. In the modern world of email that we live in, sending money via crypto is the equivalent of instant messaging. It is highly gratifying.
What fascinates me even more is our collective ability to have all these disparate crypto-networks slowly have connecting points (or bridges). Most of these bridging functions are provided by crypto-exchanges. Despite the winter of cryptocurrency, I am a firm believer that as more people embrace cryptocurrency to transact, the most use cases we will start seeing.
One of the coolest feature of most cryptocurrencies is the ability to send very small amounts. Low value payments, small payments, micro-payments, micro remittances, small value remittances, etc. Whatever you may call it, moving money in small amounts, across the border, is just not possible with traditional payment system.
In many ways, cross-border payments have a floor. This any be anywhere from $100 to $250. Sending anything less than this amount, becomes prohibitively expensive.
In the crypto universe, you can send 10 cents to your friends all day long across the world and not worry that the ecosystem will ‘eat’ away the money in fees.
This brings me to the subject I want to speak about. Fractional Investing.
It is without a doubt, written that traditional funds and equity exchanges will enter the crypto space. (I did an interview of Andy Bryant, who is the COO of bitFlyer Europe and you can hear him talk about this in our Around The Coin podcast).
The game become much more interesting when users from around the world can send their $7.13 worth of value and buy the equivalent amount of IBM shares or Berkshire Hathaway shares. You could invest as little as 5 cents or a quarter of a cent! The blockchain will keep a record of your ownership, and the crypto nature of the currency, would keep the costs extremely down.
Imagine a company like say Tesla going and launching its own stable coin or doing a Secure Token Offering (STO), as opposed to an ICO. The ability to sweep cash from the market, worldwide, would be just brilliant. Privately held companies are much more favorably positioned to go do such a thing. Think the Virgin Group!
I get super excited of the possibility of crypto-exchanges making this possible. Going to traditional companies and showing them genuine (read: legal) ways of capital raising and shares issuance within the crypto-world.
I also see, specialized off-shore / international markets that would start becoming the hub for such activity, think Zug, Switzerland or Vilnius, Lithuania or Singapore, etc.
When you have the equivalent of “coins in the couch” and “coins in the jar” start getting invested in stock and capital raises, things get really exciting.
Financially including pocket change investors in my opinion is the next big thing.
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This page was last updated on September 1, 2022.
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