# Abra https://www.abra.com/ ## General - They've pivoted to "Buy, trade, borrow, and earn interest on crypto" - disappointing ## Abra CEO: Crypto Firms’ Route to Remittances at Scale Will Be Complex but Successful https://cointelegraph.com/news/abra-ceo-crypto-firms-route-to-remittances-at-scale-will-be-complex-but-successful ##### 2019 [[CoinTelegraph]] article ### Main takeaways - The hardest part is establishing on-the-ground agents - [[Western Union]] clearly has the advantage here - “The cost of customer acquisition in the remittance space is incredibly high. The likes of Western Union, Xoom [and] Remitly spend anywhere from $75 to $125 to acquire a customer in that space.” - They're trying to build a 1MM customer base on other services first, then use that to establish a remittance network... I'm pretty skeptical it'll work ### Full text Bill Barhydt, CEO of crypto wallet provider and payment startup [Abra](https://cointelegraph.com/tags/abra), believes that consumer cross-border payments and remittance services at scale continue to be a struggle for many crypto firms. Barhydt made his remarks during an [interview](https://breakermag.com/abra-ceo-bill-barhydt-on-how-bitcoin-can-still-democratize-finance/) with blockchain news source Breaker Mag on Jan. 30. As Barhydt outlined, Abra — which counts around 500,000 users in over 100 countries, and supports 30 crypto assets and 50 fiat currencies — was founded with the aspiration to create a crypto-based global bank, which would enable worldwide, frictionless money transfers and credit services. Yet even as the service gains traction as an investment platform, the CEO argued that expansion in the money-transfer space poses a greater challenge — particularly in the field of remittances. Barhydt recalled an Abra initiative to establish a network of on-the-ground agents to provide cash to recipients of crypto money transfers, explaining that the cost of deploying their running network in the [Philippines](https://cointelegraph.com/tags/philippines) would have cost $1 billion and not made financial sense: > ==“The cost of customer acquisition in the remittance space is incredibly high. The likes of Western Union, Xoom [and] Remitly spend anywhere from $75 to $125 to acquire a customer in that space.”== The CEO outlined that overcoming the up-front costs of providing crypto remittances at scale is more likely to be achievable if a service can first establish a million-user network for other services, and then move on to providing crypto-enabled remittances or low-cost microloans. - (the rest is mostly BS about crypto-collateralized assets)