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Local start-up in deal to accept Bitcoin Cash at till points

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 18 May 2018
In Hong Kong this week for the Coingeek.com conference are nChain Group CEO Jimmy Nguyen; Lorien Gamaroff, co-CEO Centbee; Dr Craig Wright, chief scientist at nChain, and Angus Brown, Centbee co-CEO.
In Hong Kong this week for the Coingeek.com conference are nChain Group CEO Jimmy Nguyen; Lorien Gamaroff, co-CEO Centbee; Dr Craig Wright, chief scientist at nChain, and Angus Brown, Centbee co-CEO.

Local Bitcoin start-up Centbee has partnered with global blockchain research firm nChain, to enable retailers to easily and quickly accept Bitcoin Cash at the till point.

The announcement was made at the first CoinGeek conference this week in Hong Kong, focused on merchant adoption of Bitcoin Cash and growth of a new Bitcoin commerce (bCommerce) world.

nChain and Centbee announced a partnership which will ensure the speedy development of a merchant point of sale (POS) software development kit (SDK) for the worldwide market.

In January, nChain announced it had taken an equity stake in South African Bitcoin wallet provider Centbee.

nChain says its mission is to enable massive growth of the Bitcoin network (focusing on Bitcoin Cash as the true Bitcoin) and thus "create a dramatic increase in the value of Bitcoin Cash for everyone's benefit".

Bitcoin Cash is a crypto-currency. In mid-2017, the developers, not content with the Segregated Witness feature, implemented a change to the Bitcoin code. The change, called a hard fork, took effect on1 August 2017.

The new SDK is an open source set of tools, processes and interfaces that software developers and system integrators can use to enable retailers to easily and quickly accept Bitcoin Cash at the till point.

"Merchant acceptance of Bitcoin has been very limited to date. Centbee announced earlier this year that we would roll out mechanisms for merchants to accept Bitcoin Cash payments without exposure to price volatility and without installing new terminal hardware. This SDK is that global payment system," says Angus Brown, Centbee co-CEO.

The project is funded by nChain to promote its vision of making it easy for everyone to use Bitcoin Cash for payments. The company says Bitcoin Cash fulfils the original vision for Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system specifically built for worldwide transactions.

"As Centbee has focused on user-friendly Bitcoin wallets and merchant payment solutions, we have partnered with them to ensure retailers can accept Bitcoin Cash at in-store points of sale for goods and services," says nChain Group CEO Jimmy Nguyen.

"This SDK will make it easier for merchants, through their POS systems, to join the world of bCommerce. Centbee smartly embraces Bitcoin Cash because its bigger blocks, low fees and fast transaction network represent the true vision of Bitcoin."

Last year, Centbee successfully piloted the acceptance of Bitcoin payments at retail points of sale.

Based in South Africa, Centbee was founded in 2016 by co-CEOs, Lorien Gamaroff and Angus Brown.

Gamaroff is a high-profile expert in blockchain technologies and crypto-currencies. He has consulted and advised regulators and large companies internationally and is highly regarded globally as an educator and presenter.

Brown has 20 years' experience in payments and banking, including the role of co-founder and CEO of eBucks.com, a world-first bank-backed digital currency created in 2000.

Centbee is a gold member of AlphaCode, the fintech investment arm of Rand Merchant Investment Holdings.

"We are excited about what Centbee is doing: helping crypto to go mainstream and providing real-world transactional capability," says Dominique Collett, head of AlphaCode.

"The Centbee origin story is also a good one as Lorien and Angus met at AlphaCode. This is a great example of how putting smart people in a room together can unlock creative, new ideas and hopefully spawn large, successful businesses. This was the premise of establishing AlphaCode as a fintech community: to stimulate the development of the next generation of financial services entrepreneurs," she concludes.

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