Overstock.com has taken a US$4m stake in Bitt.com – a Caribbean-based financial technology firm looking to digitize Barbadian dollar transactions using the blockchain technology that underpins Bitcoin.
Bitt, which launched a digitised Barbadian dollar on the bitcoin blockchain in February 2016 – backed by the Central Bank of Barbados, hopes to reduce the high fees charged by banks in the region when trying to move money in and out of the Caribbean. It is making attempts to convince Caribbean governments to accept digital national currencies in the hope that the reduced cost associated with digitised currency transactions will ease access to global markets for local small businesses.
The firm specifically aims to allow users to transfer payments directly via their phones. Small businesses and individual citizens would theoretically be able to participate more freely in global markets by way of cheaper electronic access to markets.
“A major impediment to economic advancement around the world is the fact that the vast majority of humans are unbanked…yet mobile penetration in some countries exceeds 100%,” said Overstock.com CEO Dr. Patrick M. Byrne, in a statement.
“Bitt has a vision for the Caribbean of frictionless mobile cash, beginning with central banks transparently issuing digital fiat which is then exchanged on a blockchain (all under proper regulatory oversight, as with our t0 offering to Wall Street).”
T0 is a trading platform built by Overstock and powered by the blockchain that aims to provide real-time settlement of equities transactions – as opposed to the T+2 or T+3 settlement that currently exists in US markets. Overstock plans to issue a set of its own shares via the platform sometime in the next several months.
Bitt plans to digitise the rest of the fiat currencies in the Caribbean region in the future. Similar developments are occurring in Africa, where start-up technology companies and governments are looking at ways of updating settlement procedures to reduce costs and ease access to global markets.
“Our aim is to use crypto-technology to turn our regional citizens into global citizens, giving them the ability to send or receive money directly via their phones, in seconds, from all corners of the globe,” said Bitt CEO and Co-Founder, Gabriel Abed.
Overstock’s stake is part of a larger strategy to link with a host of smaller financial technology providers around the world to create a fabric of blockchain providers that will in turn support plans for its t0 platform, Byrne told IFR.
Bitt and t0 are one of a host of blockchain offerings for financial services currently in development. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation this week announced plans to explore blockchain uses in its repo settlement service.
