Terra just made four killer announcements during Korea Blockchain Week that will put it at the forefront of the Korean market.
Terra is one of the most promising projects coming out of South Korea. It is an algorithmic stablecoin that aims to become the first mass-adopted cryptocurrency. Thanks to its payments DApp – CHAI – Terra is optimally primed to take over the Korean market. Yesterday, during the Korea Blockchain Week, Co-Founder Do Wong made four massive announcements:
CHAI is going to collaborate with BC Card, the largest payment processor in Korea, to launch a debit card by early 2020. This card will be accepted at BC Card’s 3 million+ affiliates in Korea, with plans to expand globally with BC’s global network partners.
CHAI will be conducting offline payments with CU. CU happens to be Korea’s largest convenience store chain with 14,000 retail locations scattered across the country.
CHAI is now available on Yanolja – Korea’s version of hotels.com. Yanojla has over ten million users and generates over $2 billion in GMV.
Terra partnered up with Shinsegae (SSG) Duty Free and enabled global payments in Hong Kong via a localized app called “CHAI DF.” SSG Duty Free happens to be a market leader in Korea’s $17 billion duty-free shopping market.
More on Terra
Terra was built with the Cosmos SDK and Tendermint, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. The Terra stablecoin is collateralized by a second native token called Luna (LUNA). Luna is listed on a number of Korean exchanges as well as global exchanges like Bitrue, KuCoin, and Bittrex. The two target audience groups for Terra are merchants and end-users.
Merchants: Due to the complicated payment systems, merchants end up paying 2-3% transaction fees. Terra looks to replace the existing system and bypass the need of multiple intermediaries to facilitate transactions with one single blockchain layer, which will drop the transaction fees to just 0.5%.
End-user: As Terra keeps growing, the end-users will be able to enjoy a 5-10% discount rate for every transaction. The reason why that will be possible is because of simple supply-demand mechanics. Terra keeps its price steady by increasing and decreasing the money supply. As the Terra economy grows, they will be able to fund discounts with the money supply growth.
CHAI a next-generation Mobile Payment Gateway
Terra’s payments dApp, CHAI, allows users to make online payments by adding their bank accounts. It has become immensely popular in a very short amount of time. Within three months after launching, CHAI has become the 4th and 13th most popular app in the finance category on Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store, respectively. It has also surpassed the local digital payments leader KakaoPay on both charts.
What is the significance of these announcements?
With CHAI, Terra has a payment dApp that has garnered a considerable following. Within three months, CHAI had already gained a staggering 430,000 users. Seeing this popularity, more and more online platforms (like Yanolja) have started integrating CHAI within their systems. Terra is looking to hit an annual run rate of $1 billion by 2019 though these online integrations alone, making it one of the most active blockchain networks in the world.
However, as the CU announcement indicates, CHAI is being adopted by companies for offline payments as well. This will significantly increase CHAI’s consumer touchpoints and spike up user activity.
Finally, with the BCcard partnership, virtually everyone in South Korea will have access to Terra’s blockchain payments network.
Conclusion
Usability and accessibility is the key to growth for any payments system – centralized or decentralized. With Terra, we have an intriguing case of a stablecoin, backed by solid fundamentals, which is actually being used by a vast audience, both online and offline.
As CHAI gets adopted by more platforms, both merchants and users will be exposed to the benefits of the Terra blockchain (low transaction fees and higher discount rates). This will undoubtedly attract more attention to CHAI and Terra and put them in prime position to dominate the market.