OneChain’s feature 4: Lighting transfer

During the 2015 summer, when I was doing internship in Brussels, Belgium, I used to go shopping every weekend at the Gare de Midi, I was always curious about the long queue before the Money transfer shop, from the crowd it was easy to notice that most of them are African or Arabic immigrants. They are sending money back to their family through Western Union and other agencies, it is called cross border remittance or international transfer.

Actually, there are at least two great remittance corridors in the world, US-Mexico and Europe-Africa, it is estimated that the overall annual remittance flowing into the developing countries is larger than the OECD aids. The remittance helped the El Salvador survived after a fierce hurricane attacks in 2005, it is the supporting pillar of many South Asian families. In other words, it could be another important tool in the war against the poverty.

However, there are several inconveniences for the Western Union transfer:

*As an individual, you must provide a bunch of documents, such as a bank statement, one valid ID and a physical mailing address, while in many developing countries, a lot of people don’t have ID nor bank account, they are financially excluded so they are not able to benefit from this services;
*It charges a high fees and applies the poorest exchange rate when it comes to the transfer of two different currencies.

What is SWIFT and How does it work?

Apart from the Western Union transfer, big financial institutions use the SWIFT network to move the money cross the borders. SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is a messaging network that financial institutions use to securely transmit information and instructions through a standardized system of codes. Relying on its more than 10,000 financial institutions in 212 different countries, it provides a secure network that allow companies or individuals to send and receive information about financial transactions to each other.

The SWIFT network doesn’t actually transfer funds, but instead sends payment orders between institutions’ account, sometimes through one or various correspond banks. This is expensive, at a minimum it costs in a range of USD 20 to USD 50, especial for the small sum of money transfer, this mechanism is way to expensive, besides, the transfer can take up to 5 working days.

Bitcoin transfer has been considered as the silver bullet to the above mentioned problem, it doesn’t require the user’s ID nor bank account, and the money can be settled within minutes. However, transferring money via bitcoin is more complicated and you need some basic process as the following:

Deposit your fiat currency onto a bitcoin exchange;
*Purchase the bitcoin and send it to your recipient;
*The receiver sells the bitcoin for fiat currency on a bitcoin exchange;
*The receiver withdraws the fiat currency to his bank account.

Due to the block size limitation, there is usually bitcoin traffic congestion and miners sometimes claim a high confirmation fees.

OneChain team is aware of these problems facing by bitcoin, its cutting edge Peer-to-Peer technology not only speeds up the transfer to 3000 TPS, but also reduces the transaction fee to almost zero. It has a lot of similarities with Bitcoin cash, but unlike the Bitcoin cash, which is a forked coin on Blockchain, OneChain is fully based on it own blockchain. This dApp now supports more than 700 cryptocurrencies and enables the small sum money transfer within seconds, and large sum within minutes. This is an ideal tool for both individuals and merchants.

Please download our dApp here: http://app.onechain.one/appstart_en.html