Bernhard Muller, General Manager and Founder of BSV payments processor Centi, thinks the key to creating a popular, scalable product is ensuring that anyone will be able to use it, not just people who are interested in Bitcoin.
“We really want to design a product for everyone, my mum, my brother, my uncle, everyone who doesn’t know about Bitcoin, who doesn’t care about Bitcoin even,” he says.
He believes that Centi’s simplicity will be its USP and will enable it to be rolled out to a range of different customers who haven’t necessarily used Bitcoin or integrated it into their business model before.
For example, he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that he is purposefully targeting the media and events industries, through the launch of Centi’s ‘space concept’. This feature will allow merchants to customise pages on the app so users can buy tickets and merchandise quickly and easily online.
“For example, if you want to sell a consumer a hamburger at the event, you can basically purchase the product digitally, directly in the app and then you just need to go and collect it rather than standing in line somewhere.”
The peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin helps to ensure that transactions are extremely quick and direct, and if both customer and merchant have Centi enabled, the funds go straight from one to another, without travelling through any custodians or middlemen.
So far, there are three onboarded merchants who are using the service commercially; one is a bar, one is a ramen noodle store, and one is a clothes shop, but Bernhard hopes to have at least a thousand merchants by the end of 2023.
While this might sound ambitious, he explains that they already have strategies in place to work with other partners who already have a long list of customers.
He also hopes that the straightforwardness of the product, thanks to a recent redesign, will prove to be a winning combination for commercial clients. But, just in case that wasn’t enough to attract new users, he’s incorporated a faucet into the app.
This means that anyone using the Centi app can receive 1 Swiss Franc (approximately 1 US dollar) just for signing up. Bernhard explains that faucets were big in Bitcoin in the early days and are aimed at getting people to experience the product without needing to connect their finances to the app.
He’s excited about the potential he sees for getting outsiders involved in Bitcoin SV and references the BSV Global Blockchain Convention as an example of how much opportunity there is, especially in comparison to how it used to be.
“The first conference we had in London after this whole split ordeal between BSV and BCH happened, I mean, it was a tiny group of people, I don’t know maybe a hundred, two hundred people that were there and now this has grown substantially with all these ambassadors and Block Dojos’ and Citadels.”