Highlight of a recent blogpost from 1729. Remittances are one of the key drivers of crypto adoption!

I read an excellent blog called 1729 from Balaji Srinivasan. I would strongly suggest that you do the same. Check out 1729.com. As an aside, many of you might be wondering what is special about 1729? No, it doesn't refer to some historical event that happened that year. Rather, 1729, the Hardy-Ramanujan Number, is the smallest number which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways. 1729 is the sum of the cubes of 10 and 9 - cube of 10 is 1000 and cube of 9 is 729; adding the two numbers results in 1729. 1729 is also the sum of the cubes of 12 and 1- cube of 12 is 1728 and cube of 1 is 1; adding the two results in 1729.

Ok, enough of the math lesson, back to today's topic, remittances and how they are revolutionizing the uptake in crypto. Today, there was a great blogpost on 1729 and it was entitled:

Here is the actual link to the story:

https://1729.com/crypto-remittances

The key takeaways are as follows:

• Every day, millions of foreign workers around the world, transmit a portion of their hard-earned wages back to family members and friends living in their countries of origin. 

• Crypto remittances have been talked about as an answer to this problem for most of the last decade. Over the past few years, it has actually begun to work.

• Africa. According to figures from Chainanalysis, roughly “$562 million worth of cryptocurrency was transferred directly from overseas addresses to ones based in Africa in retail-sized payments,” in the year 2020.

• Latin America. Bitcoin payments sent to the region more than doubled from under $1.5 Billion in 2019 to over $3 billion in 2020.

• Asia. One popular blockchain used for cross-border payments in Southeast Asia saw its transaction volume increase tenfold in 2020.

• Remittance Prices Worldwide, a publication of the World Bank, reports that the global average fee cost of sending a remittance payment, whether through a bank, by post office, or through a dedicated transfer service like Western Union, was around 6.38 percent in the first quarter of 2021, based on an average retail transaction of $200. That same World Bank report also noted the continued exploitative role of banks, noting that “banks remain the most expensive type of service provider, with an average cost of 10.66 percent,” for sending a small remittance.
• The cost of sending money across borders, even intra-regionally, in some parts of the world can go much higher, running up to 20 percent in some sub-Saharan African countries.
• Efforts to reduce the average fee of sending a remittance to the UN goal of around 3 percent – a reduction that would save around $20 billion worldwide – have proven stubbornly difficult to meet.
• While it’s still dwarfed by the nearly $50 billion in fiat sent as remittances to Africa on an annual basis, the use of crypto is growing fast among people who are attracted by not just the possibility of saving huge amounts on fees, but avoiding foreign exchange risks in countries with historically unstable currencies.
• DeFi innovation will cut costs more. Continued innovation in decentralized finance and cryptocurrency that helps cut down or eliminate the more than 6 percent average cost of sending a remittance worldwide will mean savings of billions of dollars for people in ascending world countries. To learn more about Defi, please read this: https://thrivingwithinterest.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-quick-primer-on-defi-uniswap-vs.html

A picture tells a thousand words, so here are two graphs worth seeing:

The next time someone asks you why use or what makes it special, well there are many reasons but this should be Exhibit A.

Onwards...