Electroneum expands its mobile payment ecosystem across new markets

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Richard ELLs CEO and founder of electro neom back on the show once again Richard pleasure to see you again thank you so much for taking the time why thank you very much yeah well to kick off our second interview I love for you to explain for

0:24those who aren't familiar and didn't see our first interview a little bit of background on what is electro Neum okay yeah thanks very much well electro newest cryptocurrency we started in 2017 with launched in 2017 we were working on it earlier than that of course but it's a very very easy to use cryptocurrency works all on smart phones and we developed it for the for the unbanked so

0:50lots of crypto projects will tell you that they are designed to work for the unbanked but we truly were designed for it and and it's going exceedingly well so we make it very easy for for people who genuinely don't have a bank account to get hold of some cryptocurrency eternium by earning it so we have a freelancer platform it's going very well and and then they can spend it on lots

1:15of different things within the network nearly 2,000 different outlets for it now so yeah it's basically an easy to use that's great and moving into banking the unbanked there's so much potential and so many people that need need these type of services however when you move into the world of cryptocurrency there's also that factor of security and financial independence and having

1:40control of your own funds can you talk about your thesis for cryptocurrency security and how you've implemented that into electro Liam yeah yeah not too so well again fairly generically there's a phrase of in they have been some purist crypto community we just don't own the keys you don't own the crypto everybody who's seen this industry would have seen

2:03at some point some of the major exchanges a lot of the minor exchanges have been hacked and people's it's stolen this is a terrible tragedy but we should be very aware that if they control their own keys they definitely definitely have security cause then they have the dangers and the responsibilities of looking after that case so well we've guys we've built a

2:24hot wallet system that's really really easy use it enables needs to transfer it's really important so people comply things really quickly and walk away so that all happens within our hot wallet system but at the same time what we've done is we've enabled a cold wallet system where users are encouraged to put the bulk of their crypto wealth onto a cold storage system that we've developed

2:46that enables them to control their own kids but like I say there's always there's a conundrum throughout this whole industry which is you know it's quite difficult to you to know where to keep those keys and how to keep them safe you print them on a piece of paper in your house fire you've lost your keys you can't ever recover the Krypton so it is a bit of a

3:06conundrum for people but we do certainly suggest to people that if they if they can keep it safely remember you can cut those keys into parts so you can always give someone a friend half a key to look after and it doesn't matter if he looks at it you can't take your crypto give another half to another friend and you can do that with a number of friends

3:24knowing that if your copybook destroyed you could ask two friends but keep out together so you have to think a little bit laterally but yeah we have a solution for it at least yeah well it seems like it's been working pretty well with electro Neum so far I know that you have great adoption last time we spoke you were in a hundred and forty countries so congratulations so far on

3:45the growth and at that time you were entering Africa Brazil and Turkey now that was late last year could you talk about you know that those expansion plans and has the adoption started growing in those areas yeah I mean it's it's been quite phenomenal journey actually lots and lots of crypto projections so not only did they talk about the unbanked but they will talk

4:07about mass adoption you might have seen the the height but it's very difficult to go to mass adoption without at least getting adoption I would certainly say we have large adoption a lot of people would probably call it mass adoption we do have million users but from our perspective we only or student start of our journey even though that journey puts us way ahead of

4:30virtually all of the cryptocurrencies outside the top ten in terms of real-world adoption but you know when you when you spoke to me last we rolled out so Etienne talk that was so airtime for ETN the unbanked of the world don't have an exchange so they can't go to an exchange to buy crypto they can't go to an exchange to swap it's a fit so what are they doing okay so we've got a way

4:53of people earning etn which maybe we're talking about later or another time but we've got way of people earning etn or think what any task freelance buckle and then they can spend their ATM at least in one box there's lots of lots of other places in many countries but what we do is we teamed up with airtime for providers so your mobile network providers and enable people to buy

5:15airtime through our app with ETA and many many places around the world airtime and and money are maybe not synonymous and certainly I have to be careful with what I say here but but people certainly use it as a way of understanding what that value is so a dollar of air time gets transferred around quite a lot in many developing countries so you could even go to a

5:37market stall and often buy something with a dollar of airtime airtime gets used as a commodity so by us allowing people to get airtime for ETN that's actually enabled us to to monetize that etn for those 140 countries we talk about well that's gone that we've just under 200,000 airtime tops on our network I think actually we're about $185,000 maybe maybe even more than that

6:06now but it's it's an enormous amount of airtime top-up still taking place and we've seen that the market very very sensitive to the price of each year so the price of etn goes up we have this huge amount of people buying air time so even though those people have probably never seen crypto before until they saw it at training them yeah very price sensitive to those fluctuations and they

6:26take best advantage it's quite good to see it yeah that's super interesting how the airtime is almost equivalent to a currency in these emerging countries and for electroni him to find that staple and utilize that to help with the growth definitely seems like a really good strategy and you also just mentioned that you have the any task freelancer platform is one of the latest releases

6:49that I saw that electro neum is working on can we talk about that a little bit you know with this freelancer platform that you just came out with why is this the right time and why is this the best thing for the cryptocurrency and for electro Neum to grow in adoption well what we would exhibit the cryptocurrency is really getting what you've working in

7:07the robot loads and loads of cryptocurrencies exist as you know nearly all of them only exist within the source speculative crypto community bubble they don't necessarily exist outside that sphere in the real world with people really doing things with them and that we wanted to break that mold of electron in but we really wanted to solve a trouble so if the problem is

7:28unbanked and like I say there's a ton of projects that will say that but but we literally work from the ground up and said how can you take somebody in the developing world so let's say they're in Indonesia or they're in Africa they're in South America how can you empower them with a crypto constant well you can't they can't go out and buy some Bitcoin they don't necessarily have a

7:49Bitcoin wallet they don't have anything way to buy Bitcoin now that's not to say that they can't try really hard to buy some big point of course there are ways of doing it and people will seriously bit so I'm not I said don't ever think that I'm doing Bitcoin by the lake is like massive massive reply but what I'm saying is that Vikram wasn't easiest

8:07thing to get to get hold on so we made electro named exceedingly easy to use and we took away all of this sort of requirement for a long period of time between it transferring the value and it by being at the other end and then what we did we built the freelance platform that's really easy to use it's it's a little bit like Fiverr for instance so it's fairly simplistic it's not one of

8:29the more complicated ones where you have to bid against other people to get the the freelance work it's fairly simple you list your skills and that skill might be something like I can I can cut out images so if you if somebody's got a whole load of images they want on transparencies these guys can cut them out free time-consuming fairly simplistic it's a perfect kind of

8:48job to go into any time so they put it on and say all I do have cut out the three dots now if you imagine in the in the real world of currency fiat currency someone would have to transfer three dollars to Indonesia it's physically it must be content it cost you thirty dollars or twenty dollars in a bank just to transfer it and of course they haven't

9:07got a bank account so there's no it's transfer to so cryptocurrency was the perfect solution and we made the electro neum the perfect crypto constant to the solution so we made any task powered by it and it's gone again it's going crazy it's absolutely fantastic we had four hundred and forty thousand people visit site we've had 18 thousand tasks rejected dieting six thousand have been

9:31accepted so we have three times as many tasks listed that we got along we like that kick him out and then we've got six thousand listed and last month so in June 2020 we the turnover was was just under seventeen thousand US dollars of tops six seven hundred Stella's had solid tasks in June and seventeen thousand dollars worth so there's were only four months old it's absolutely the

10:00most successful freelance platform in crypto that's ever happen at home and we're only just at the start the journey we have a really good a really good solid marketing plan to to take this forwards to to gain proper market share and then we go from that when we're talking about adoption I'd say large adoption rocket might well say we've got mass adoption now but I see mass

10:21adoptions there's true millions and millions of users thirteen million points millions hundred million people actually using it that's a massive option isn't so that's that's where I want to take an actor name at the moment we have millions of users but I think we can take that to tens of millions and beyond exciting times definitely yeah well sounds like a great

10:40start to the freelancer platform you know in the hundreds of thousands already I guess moving forward you know with this mass adoption getting to the millions of users do you have a specific marketing strategy or do you consider maybe the fact that for microtasks you know having a three dollar task or something as opposed to using fiat currency that really is the competitive

11:02advantage to be able to put in tasks that are only a few dollars and not have those financial intermediary costs you know is that one of the main competitive advantages or how do you see getting this to millions of people yeah well we've got funnily enough we've tried lots of different things with all our marketing we it's all fairly scientific fairly scientific guy

11:23but in business as well but virtually my whole life I've been self-employed I've got all the businesses I've started are still running started a digital agency more than 20 years ago it's still running today got social media major platform started 2013 still right today so everything we do is thought about as a long-term business so we take our marketing we do the tests we've got lots

11:48of red red crosses red crosses then we find the green ticks well we just found that big green tick I'm not going to say what it is because any of our competitors would love to know what that is but but we've just found a great way to push forwards June was by far involved our biggest month and we know exactly what we did to get it so we have a great marketing plan in place that

12:06will drive us market share and then from this from the buyers perspective it's just as easy for a buyer to get into the market as it is if they went and bought from five accredited so five because powered by PayPal we still allow buyers to buy with a credit card and this is the exciting part so the buyer doesn't have to suddenly learn about cryptocurrency to get involved in the

12:31buying process but equally our sellers they don't even have a fiat payout option because they aren't backed so there's no point there's no way to get it to them but because we can get it to them etn and they've got an outlet to that it's airtight it means that they can absolutely compete so the fibers cheapest think by the nature of its name is is five

12:53dollars we have loads and loads of tops for one dollar some of them are astonishingly good I bought a colorization task for three dollars I think it was and for three dollars they took a photograph of my mother or 80th birthday and I had it sort of price photograph as well as just scratches and and an aged science that was all removed and they colorized it they gave a brass

13:20buckle on a belt colored clothing and colored a face and the people around her absolutely astonishing level of work three months it's just my model but that remember that the person that's earned three dollars they might well have to work a date for three cards so when they could sit there doing something that they consider to be a hobby and earn three dollars from that so then it will

13:45also be an astonishing figure but the other way around so it opens up an opportunity to both buyer and for SEPA and it's quite an exciting thing because of course what a most corporates want to do most corporate sort of small businesses that in the global north they want to save money so if you're spending thousand two thousand dollars a month on Fiverr and all of a sudden you can spend

14:06seven hundred and fifty twelve hundred dollars a month suddenly you're saving a real reasonable money and there are tons and tons of SEO agencies and things that are spending that kind of money enough mm-hmm well that's great and it definitely sounds like that scientific method and you know got to hold those secrets close if you're gonna gain the competitive advantage over the

14:28competitors so all the best in that and you know I have one last question we're running out of time but I'm curious to know what is in the plan for electroni I'm in the next six to 12 months are there any big updates that you can talk about that the user base are looking forward to you know what I do I probably wait this out this week I'm hoping it's

14:48this week I often put my neck on the block and it does a bit of a swing goes for it I've put numbers out there before and and found they've bit me in the bottom support so before Christmas of last year I said it would be live in X amount of countries and and actually we weren't live in xx we were only live in 14 or something but now we like 140 so we've got way past where I guest in the

15:12end but I was hoping to be live with electricity topic this week and it's still going forwards I think we've got four countries that we going a lot of electricity talk this week so that's exciting I haven't got an exact date but yeah I'm hoping Wednesday Thursday and then a total exclusive which wasn't really gonna I might put it in me mother we send out now I'm saying it but

15:33we do have some other quite exciting things that we're going to tie in as well we've been talking to Lowe's and those are people have other things that we can that we can do and when you have to think about we're trying to think of something that virtually everybody can buy they or something that lots of people can buy your obvious one is their time because everyone wants to get

15:51access to the internet by smartphone then the next thing for us was was utilities so electricity was obvious again because it's so tied in with what we're doing and then that we thought okay well what other things are they no one other ones that I am going to say that we hopefully get it will be this year everybody knows that I always deliver on everything I say sometimes

16:11I'm a bit late but hopefully this year we will see some gaming integration so computer gaming the unbanked do not have access to all of those lovely virtual currencies within games so the V bucks of the world or whatever it is that they're using robux these days I guess it's no roblox robux that's what it is so there's robots there's feed marks there's all these things I'm not a gamer

16:36so forgive me when I get these things give us people but yes or what we are looking at some integrations for that but you try and take those cool games into the developing world and give them access even though they're unbanked to those platforms so quite an exciting development which we're hoping to get out this year that's great Richard and yeah Gaming is

16:58a very hot topic especially for 2020 and throughout the lockdown gamers set to their computers and and I think that's going to be a global trend moving forward so looking to see how that plays out we're out of time but what is the best way for viewers to follow along with electro Neum look at these updates and get involved with the community absolutely yeah I very much appreciate

17:22you taking the time to interview me and if people want to get involved go and have a look at electron um calm and come off all of the projects we're doing a lot so it's an exciting time and and make sure you follow the channel and subscribe it's an absolute pleasure to be on very clearly hey thank you so much Richard all the best with electroni I'm moving forward

17:44I'll leave those links in the description box below and let's follow up in the near future well that's thank you