Cashaa-The Future of Blockchain in Payments
In the last few years, you may have heard a lot of buzz words revolving around cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. With all the glitz and glamour of Bitcoin in mainstream media, we know that blockchain tech is the future, but exactly how does it make our life any better?
Everyday, new ICO companies strive to disrupt their respective industries by becoming a decentralized internet, supercomputer or even a decentralized VR space. However, in this race to become the next unicorn blockchain company, it really comes down to two things: real-life application and adoption.
Both of which, Cashaa already has.
What is Cashaa?
Cashaa boasts themselves as the next generation blockchain financial platform with a unique take on a better peer-to-peer money transfer system for the world. The Cashaa team, led by CEO Kumar Gaurav, believes there should be an efficient alternative to our obsolete payment and banking system.
By using Cashaa’s blockchain-based payments system, the financial inclusion barriers that turn away the billions of unbanked/underbanked people from financial services, will essentially be eliminated.
The Problem Cashaa Solves
Everyday, people send money all over the world. For example, individuals may transfer large sums of money to support their families in other countries across the world. This is known as the remittance industry, estimated to be a 600 billion dollar industry.
The problem with sending large sums of money across international borders is that it is still very expensive, overly complicated and time consuming. By using traditional means, fees can cost you 6% to 12% to send the money. So imagine sending your hard-earned sum of $1000 to your family in Africa, and having to pay a shocking $124 to do so. This is a very real scenario, and up until now, limited options like Western Union & Moneygram are the only methods of doing so.
At 2017’s Techcrunch Disrupt in London, Kumar expresses “people claim that Africa needs help, Africa needs attention [and] empowerment, but how pity is it that the people who are talking about this are charging them the most [to send money to Africa].”
Kumar’s response to this problem? To offer essentially zero fees for money transfers worldwide, including to Africa.
How Does Cashaa Work?
In short, Cashaa bridges the forex market with the cryptocurrency market by matching fiat senders and cryptocurrency traders. The payments platform enables people to send money all over the world with a fixed low fee of $1.
Let’s say for example, you want to transfer money for remittance from the U.K. to India. You would be trading your British Pounds for Indian Rupee.
The way Cashaa’s platform works is by matching your request with a cryptocurrency trader that wants to sell bitcoins in exchange for British Pounds. The platform will then find another trader in India that wants to buy the bitcoins and pay for it in Indian Rupees. The Rupee goes to your intended receiver.
This creates an ideal win-win situation for cash senders and cryptocurrency traders. The cryptocurrency traders are happy because they have access to higher liquidity and more trading opportunities. On the other hand, cash senders are happy because crypto traders are competing for their money. And best of all, their money gets sent to their intended destination without the unreasonably high transfer fee.
According to Kumar, this innovative method can bring the power of cryptocurrency to over 99% of the world who don’t know a single thing about cryptocurrency or blockchain. And because this is all powered by smart contracts, there is no hassle of dealing with traditional crypto exchanges and wallets or fear of getting scammed.
For more information on how Cashaa works, you can visit their white paper here.
The Cashaa Roadmap
The most impressive thing about Cashaa is that, unlike most other ICO companies with just a white paper and vision, Cashaa already has a working product. That’s right — even before Cashaa was formed, Kumar developed a simple protocol and MVP (proof of concept) to allow people to start trading.
To his surprise, in just 90 days, his user base organically grew to over 7,000 traders in 80 countries. In fact, the platform moved over a million dollars in such a short timespan. The current beta for Cashaa is closed in preparation for the commercial launch. However, in the end, they accumulated over 12,000 registered members from 141 countries that were trading cryptocurrency with 141 different fiat currencies. They have since moved several millions of dollars through the platform.
Fast forward to 2017 Q4 and their roadmap looks poised to achieve mass adoption in a quick manner.
2018 Q1: The first quarter after their token generation event, they plan to go straight to work with partnerships, starting with Asian and African banks for remittance solutions. Cashaa will also launch their multi crypto currency exchange in India, allowing trading of 10+ legitimate coins.
2018 Q2: The second quarter of 2018 aims to tackle Europe. Cashaa plans for the Electronic Money Institutions in Europe to issue IBAN for European users. The launch of Cashaa debit cards in Europe will shortly follow.
The plan to integrate Auxledger is huge. With this, they will be able to provide access of Cashaa to tens of millions of people in India.
2018 Q3: The third quarter will allow Cashaa cards/wallet to reach India. Potentially thousands of local payout locations will be established in Africa, Nigeria, India and Southeast Asia (Philippines, Indonesia, etc.)
At least 10 more valuable coins will be introduced on their P2P trading platform.
2018 Q4: Around this time next year, Cashaa hopes to obtain the necessary licenses for P2P loans. All while more top coins are being added to the platform.
The implementation of Agrello’s smart contracts solution will bring A.I. onto their platform.
The Team & Advisors
The Cashaa team is one of the most impressive teams I have ever seen assembled in the blockchain industry. From the very top of the chain to the bottom, including the advisors, everyone is top-notch.
Just to name a few notable individuals:
Kumar Gaurav, the CEO & Cofounder, is not only the Chairman of Auxesis Group, but also listed as one of the Top 100 Blockchain Influencers according to Richtopia.
Celestine Vettical is Cashaa’s very own Chairman & Cofounder. He’s held respectable titles such as the World Wide Director at Microsoft, Director at SAP, VP of Baker Hughes, VP at Cognizant.
Both Celestine and Kumar have had experience in startups and have had their companies acquired by large conglomerates (Baker Hughes and Esedra, respectively).
The advisors consist of titles such as:
Bernard Lietaer — The author of The Future of Money.
Richard Kastelein — The Founder and Publisher of Blockchain News.
Winston Gilpin — Executive Manager and CFO of Mercury Fund.
Anil Elara — Head of Information & Data Analytics of Visa
Colum Rafferty — Managing Director at Aventi Technologies.
Dinesh Prasad — Head of Sales at Qualcomm India & South Asia.
Rajesh Dhuddu — SVP of Quatrro.
The whole team and advisors were impressive, so I would suggest checking out the rest of them and their background on Cashaa’s Team page.
CAS Tokens — The Cashaa ICO Details
Cashaa will be raising approximately 105,000 ETH, depending on price of Ethereum*. They will have a max cap of 510,000,000 CAS tokens, which brings them to a circulating supply that’s roughly 51% of total tokens (1 billion total CAS).
As a reference, each CAS token will cost $.10 USD.
The CAS Token Supply Breakdown:
24% of token supply will go to the company in the reserve to expand liquidity and create partnerships for future growth.
20% of the token supply will go to the Cashaa Team, vested over a 3-year period.
5% of the tokens will go toward the Cashaa community, including bounty programs, developers, community managers that ultimately help the ecosystem.
And of course, the remaining 51% is for the public during pre-sale & ICO.
CAS Token Schedule, Requirements & Bonus:
The pre-sale starts October 20th, and will require a minimum of $15k USD. Unlike most ICOs, Cashaa will accept USD, BTC, ETH, GBP and EUR in the pre-sale, while offering a generous bonus structure.
Public crowd sale begins November 6th and will span for 4 weeks, ending on December 5th or until the cap has been reached. U.S. Citizens must be accredited investors to participate.
Kumar mentioned that Cashaa will have a KYC (Know-Your-Client) that’s stricter than most ICOs. This means that you not only need a government-issued ID or passport, but also proof of residence.
Proof of Residence can consist of: bank statements, utility bills, post paid mobile bill, certificate of registrations at the government department (with your address). These documents that will be checked must be less than 3 months old.