Article by DIBIGN Coinsea
On July 15, Roger Ver, CEO of Bitcoin.com and evangelist for Bitcoin Cash (the fourth largest cryptocurrency), aired a discussion on YouTube with his old friends Jake Smith and Mike Malley about wechat traffic and the new Bitcoin cash wallet based on wechat.
Wechat, a text/voice messaging APP launched in 2011, accounts for 34% of all mobile traffic in China, dwarfed by Facebook’s 14% share in the US.
What? ! Wechat red envelopes can now be sent “bitcoin cash”??
The three cryptocurrency experts talked about the newly launched wechat Local Wallet, which supports on-chain transactions, called sending and receiving Bitcoin cash. Transfers can be made between friends who have wechat accounts, or data can be backed up using private keys. The wallet was developed by a “personal friend” of the team. In Roger Ver’s words:
“Before dark, Mike had sent me some Bitcoin cash on wechat. It’s kind of like the Chinese red envelopes you might have seen. You don’t have to be Chinese to have seen it.”
In addition, the wallet supports not only P2P transactions, but also group payments. Mike Malley puts it this way:
“In addition to private hair, you can, say, send it in a group of 500 people.”
What? ! Wechat red envelopes can now be sent “bitcoin cash”??
The trio also talked about bitcoin cash, which recently went public on us crypto exchange Robinhood. For Roger Ver, it’s a “pretty big” trading platform because it recently raised a lot of venture capital (about $539 million). The downside is that Robin Hood isn’t a wallet, so it can’t send and receive digital assets to bitcoin addresses. Mike consoled: “One step at a time.”
Mike also summed up Robin Hood’s priorities as “product first, risk second” as they are looking for people who are interested in cryptocurrencies but don’t want to invest too much. He added that the platform is also working on a “zero transaction fee” model in order to be more competitive with its peers. Robin Hood also skips the concept of trading stocks and securities and focuses primarily on cryptocurrencies.
“I think they’re going to be fantastic, famous, refined, and we’re using the best cryptocurrency.”
Smith added that the Robinhood team also consulted with BTC’s CTO about the integration of Bitcoin Cash.
During this discussion centered on Bitcoin cash, Roger Ver repeatedly suggested that Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash could be used interchangeably. Not only that, he said, “Bitcoin is just an outdated version of Bitcoin Cash, because Bitcoin Cash works exactly the same as Bitcoin from 2009 to 2015.”
What? ! Wechat red envelopes can now be sent “bitcoin cash”??
He also talked about a Bitcoin cash APP called CashPay, which allows users to connect to Coinbase and automatically buy more cryptocurrencies to replace after use. On Coinbase’s page for Bitcoin Cash, select the “Pay” option to repurchase the equivalent currency.
One Reddit user, commenting on the launch of the Bitcoin cash wallet on wechat, wrote:
“Is it true? Wechat is huge in China. In its latest quarterly report, Tencent had 963 million monthly active users on wechat, or nearly 1 billion users.”
Another user, Ite13, also weighed in: ‘Really? If it’s true, it has to be a third-party app.”
Many viewers of the discussion commented that this was a potential signal for wechat to adopt Bitcoin cash, as Dare Oludare suggested,
“… Don’t be fooled, anyone can create a plug-in on wechat, but that doesn’t mean it’s adopted.”