BSV Blockchain recently had the opportunity to sit down with Lorien Gamaroff (CEO and Co-Founder of Centbee) to discuss his work, why he chose to become a BSV Ambassador and some of the exciting projects he has planned.
Sending cross-border payments remains cumbersome and expensive. Centbee addresses this problem by offering digital cash payments that are easy to send and come with minimal fees. Notably, Centbee has streamlined this process by functioning more like a social media network than a traditional banking app.
The edited interview can be found below.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and Centbee?
LG: I am Lorien Gamaroff, the CEO and Co-Founder of a company called Centbee which is a BSV-based mobile money wallet. We operate around the world but we have a strong focus, especially across the African continent. We are very excited about mobile money in Africa because it’s driving forward most Africans nowadays and we think that the BSV blockchain is just the perfect solution to be able to reduce costs and. make it easier to move money cross-border.
Can you give us an overview of Centbee’s offering and how it differs from other mobile wallets?
LG: So that’s a good question because a lot of people think that Centbee is a crypto wallet but we are not a crypto wallet. We don’t support multiple cryptos, we don’t have charts, we don’t allow users to trade or anything like that. It does fit solidly in the mobile money category which is how a lot of emerging economies work these days.
They’ve been able to leapfrog banking and move into a mobile money transactional environment and Centbee is trying to play in that space. Its core functionality is just like Vodafone’s M-Pesa or MTN Momo, where people can transact with each other peer-to-peer. They can also use the cash to purchase goods at several global retailers and brands that we’ve incorporated into the wallet. So we’re trying to compete outright with those mobile money products.
But what differentiates us, apart from using BSV for low-cost transactions, is that we are trying to bring a social element and tie the experience around what young people already use today. And that’s social media. So we’ve taken many of the elements that exist in the most popular social media apps – like Twitter Telegram, WhatsApp or Facebook – and added these to our mobile wallets so that it’s something more akin to a social network.
What you have with Centbee is that you can have chat groups, chat with your friends, and communicate with them just like you would with WhatsApp or Telegram. You can also send cash in these chats, split bills, etc.
We also have cross-border remittances built into the wallet and from anywhere in the world you can send money to bank accounts in certain countries that we currently support.
Why did you choose to build Centbee on the BSV blockchain?
LG: There are many reasons. First of all, the BSV blockchain at its core remains fixed and is set in stone. Unlike other blockchains, those protocols are constantly transforming and changing and adding new features and that sort of thing. And that creates instability when you are developing applications on top of a protocol.
And so one of the most important things about a blockchain protocol is that whoever is supporting it and backing it must have first and foremost the concept of a fixed protocol. And BSV is the original Bitcoin protocol unchanged.
Also, what is important about BSV is its scalability. When we think about transactions, if we look at blockchains like BTC, for example, they want to keep it small. And that means it’s expensive and unreliable. And so obviously the BSV blockchain is working to develop unbounded block sizes to be able to cater to all the world’s transactions at extremely low cost. So if we want a blockchain that’s going to work for us, we need to make sure that it’s very low cost. Only the BSV blockchain is working to create a world where essentially there are no limits on how many transactions can be processed.
Then of course is the idea of regulatory compliance. The BSV blockchain is very transparent. It’s a distributed ledger that you can trace payments on, and that’s very important for regulation, and to be able to link identities to the transactions on the blockchain.
What made you become a BSV Ambassador?
LG: I do believe that BSV is transformative and it’s going to improve billions and billions of people’s lives around the world. Being African myself, I can see on a day-to-day basis how the high cost of transactions is hurting people. Not only in this country, South Africa but across the continent. And so I’m very excited about the ability of BSV to be able to reduce the cost of transactions for so many people in emerging markets.
There’s just so much misinformation out there, especially because of the advent of crypto, where most people nowadays don’t think of blockchain as a low-cost digital cash network. They think of it as an easy path to riches, where they can invest and make money and trade cryptos. And that’s created a world where people have lost the message, the idea and the aims of Satoshi Nakamoto. They’ve forgotten what he tried to achieve and now it’s just about greed.
The idea was to create a regulatory-compliant, low-cost digital cash network. And so it’s not enough for me to be able to just create a business that leverages BSV. I have to educate my user base and my potential user base, as well as the broader ecosystem.
