Marc O’Brien on Crypterium’s blockchain financial services platform

0:00I'm Jay Addison from eventual for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network today on blockchain interviews we have mark o'brien the CEO of terraeum mark how're you doing today great thanks Jay glad to be with you excellent tell us about crypt areum and how it will reshape the banking industry so crypt areum had a fantastic initial coin offering back in November and we

0:25delivered a white paper that was all about revolutionising for everyday spending instant liquidity ways to spend your cryptocurrency at the point of sale online and spend it immediately yeah now I understand that your your system is supposed to be one of the fastest and easiest ways to transfer cryptocurrency to another person can you tell us a little bit more about that feature yeah

0:51so so our whole proposition is is aimed at really overturning the delays in the banking industry and when you when you try and send money overseas for instance through the traditional bank cycle it can take up to three days clear and settle through organizations like Swift and even if you want to send cryptocurrency across countries there is a delay in

1:16getting all the block chains to update in enough nodes to actually update and even then the youth user experience is actually quite clumsy where you have to copy and paste links so our new solution a new a new service that we're bringing out with beta testing this week and we'll go live next week is for people to be able to send cryptocurrency and immediately to anyone in their contacts

1:40and for that to be sent on the first node update so really superfast take less than two seconds to find the function pay somebody in crypto in your contact database and send crypto to their mobile phone that's just one of many use cases that we're bringing to the market that sounds pretty amazing and I know that is probably the weakest link in the whole cryptocurrency

2:04sector is that speed of transaction so it sounds like you guys are really attacking the the pain point in the industry so crypt Arum also has their services that they offer for those that are you know have have had bad you know experiences in the banking industry which pretty well everyone has so tell us a little bit about some of those other services that crypt area offers

2:26sure there's a hole right wide range of services that that we offer that the first one is is actually a global use case for people to top-up their mobile phone so wherever you are in the in the world you can actually use Bitcoin and ether or litecoin to top-up your mobile and that that a game will be super fast redemption its delivered on the first node update so anyone with a prepaid

2:54mobile phone which is three and a half billion people in the world can actually now use cryptocurrency to top up their mobile that's just one service that we're offering the the the other area that we aim to offer services in is for what I would call Iban payment transfers so that's you being able to pay bills or pay another account and another use case

3:18is actually to attach a card Visa MasterCard Union pay card and for people to be able to go to the point of sale or online and make payments in the way that they would do with a card payment today but instead of funding their cards with their own fear balances they're going to be able to pay with their crypto balances so it just means that people can hold balances in crypto and

3:42liquidate them immediately at the point of sale this is really important for many countries where there's low liquidity of the domestic currency some markets I just remember back 10 years ago that there was a there was a feel like a government theft of deposits in Cyprus where the government took 10% of everyone's bank balance and that's something that clearly can't happen in

4:09the cryptocurrency world the other thing is of course that in some countries there's different levels of volatility with the currency and it's hard to actually make merchant payments to to merchants in those countries in in stable hard answers and what we're saying is that there's a there's a group of consumers out there that wants to be able to pay

4:34with their crypto much more than even hold their own fiat country currency yeah I think you're absolutely right I think that new generation is kind of tired of the old system and ready for something new what are your assumptions on the user base let's say three years from now how many how many people do you think you have on the system well it's absolutely a hugely growing market and

4:58just last year we were we were predicting that there were some 10 million active crypto users in the world so 10 million out of a population of 8 billion isn't many but by this year we we estimate that that number has tripled so there are 30 million active users and when we look around the world where those where those active users of crypto are they are they are genuinely global

5:24there's one third of that crypto user base out in asia-pacific in some key markets like Japan and South Korea Singapore and Hong Kong and Australia and then a third of the global user base is the US us is a absolutely key market and then a third in the rest of the world spread between Europe Latin America Canada and Africa so for us in order to have a proposition that reaches

5:53that user base of 30 million today we do genuinely have to have a global service to reach all of those those customers in all of those regions what I mean to your point about you know what will it look like in three years time our models are saying that we were on a trajectory where this this market is at least doubling every year so 30 million today

6:16becomes 60 becomes 120 becomes 240 out in 3 years time so there's been a real uptick in interesting cryptocurrencies over the last 12 months in particular there was a spike back in November December of huge interest which of course drove some of the cryptocurrency prices up I think those have normalized out now and bakit levels that are less the tile in the marketplace and what

6:42we're seeing is a huge interest from people that are saying you know I've got a reason for sending money overseas and I get charged seven eight percent by my bank and my credit card issuer there must be a cheaper way to do it and and using Krypton will most definitely be a much cheaper way to do it and faster and who do you see the largest users of the

7:04app would it mainly be the unbanked I think today the main people that are vested in cryptocurrencies are already banked and when I talk about cryptocurrencies I mean the core ones like Bitcoin ether like coin and and so on there are clearly other models where quasi cryptocurrencies are being used to feel like

7:30m-pesa in in Africa as a huge mobile to mobile imani service and and you could call that a crypto service but it's not a blockchain based service that that we're talking about so when it comes to the marketplace today for cryptocurrency users it does it does seem to me that the the earlier adopters are going to be people that are technology savvy and

7:59probably already banked but want to diversify their assets from from Fiat holdings into crypto and maybe other asset classes like gold stocks and shares and so forth as well so I think I think the the leading edge of it is definitely the developed world but one of our use cases like the mobile topic one that I mentioned earlier in the conversation these are services that

8:23work well for the developing world and even in our demonstration I actually did a top-up to one of my Kenyan friends made him a mobile top up in Kenya chillin right it arrived within two minutes so I did a top-up from London it arrived on his mobile link enya two minutes later so I think there are some use cases that we can really use to help the developing world come

8:50into the fold of making crypto car mainstream yeah that's pretty exciting so let's talk about the Crypt areum tokens because I understand you guys have a token on your platform how does that integrate into the system yeah so so we launched our initial coin offering with our token it's called CR PT short for crypt cerium of course and we're listed on two exchanges at the moment

9:14and the the token that we have is designed to be used as gas for the transactions so in the same way that you burn ether on the ethereal network when you make him payment transactions on a network we're also using our tokens as gas for the transaction so when a customer makes $100 transaction 50 cents worth of terraeum tokens will be

9:42burnt as gas for that transaction and if you make it look at it from the perspective of the card world they have a similar similar model they have what they call interchange fees these essentially fees that pay for the use of the network in the service so when we launched our IC o—- back in November we we had a fixed supply of fully mined 100 million tokens we're not mining

10:10anymore tokens so that is the fixed supply and of course if we're burning them that fixed supply goes down over time and as we bring new customers into the service and as tokens of birth the supply goes down and of course the theoretically economic law provides and the token price will go up in line with that kind of reducing supply yeah that makes absolute sense let's talk about

10:34the business model for crypt area ma how do you plan on making profit so so our profit because we're not making profit from the crypt cerium so because they're all fully mines they were out there back in November so we're not mining anymore tokens and we're not receiving any for any payment so these are network usage network utility tokens that will be

10:59burned down so we're not making money from that what we what we will make money from is a small spread on the conversion in a cryptocurrency to fear for all of the use cases where we make that conversion so when we do a mobile transfer somebody transfers a Bitcoin to one of their friends we don't make money on that transaction at all but our network costs have already been paid for

11:24by by the token purchase but when when a customer for instance makes a card payment that's let's say a Union pay payment and they paid for shopping in in a store in London and the card comes from the Philippines then there's a there's a conversion charge that we will apply from Bitcoin to UK sterling so

11:54what we what we're making is a small spread on the FX if you like of the crypto to fear that sounds fantastic crypt areum certainly sounds like something that could be an app that could be in everybody's back pocket because it sounds like it's something that really provides a service that is not available right now certainly with the speed and everything else how come

12:14people learn more about crypt aureum and get involved in the project yeah so so we absolutely want to make crypt area where to as many people as possible so you know coming on shows like yours is obviously a key way of reaching huge numbers of people but for people to get involved more we do have facebook page we have a telegram chat service and what

12:41we what we're trying to do is get our services live in as many countries as possible so wherever you are in the world whether you're in South Korea or Singapore or San Jose we we want to be able to provide customers with service that works for you locally in your market but in terms of getting involved I would say you know join the telegram chat during the Facebook live streams

13:04that we do and connect connect with me over LinkedIn I would be delighted to hear from you and and to explain our services and hopefully get you on board as the customer that sounds great now what's the website address for anybody that wants to go directly to the website mark so it's Crypt areum calm and so CR ypt yeah I um calm mark O'Brien's CEO of

13:30Crypt areum has certainly been a pleasure having you on blockchain interviews today and we hopefully we can do a follow-up interview in the near future so that our viewers can keep track of your progress thank you very much Jay thanks mark take care