Last October 2019, after more than a year under beta and going through several rigorous developmental changes, the developers of HandCash finally released the full version of HandCash 2.0.
HandCash 1.0 was a Bitcoin mobile wallet that uses near field communication (NFC) technology, which allows users to send Bitcoin to other users by name instead of a long string of letters and numbers.
Using NFC technology, the mobile application allows mobile wallets to instantly transfer Bitcoin amounts to one another via “contactless” as long as the users’ mobile devices are within close proximity to each other. These features make HandCash easily comparable with other NFC technologies such as credit cards and Apple Pay.
The HandCash mobile application is developed by the partnership of founders Alex Agut and Rafael Jimenez Seibane. Agut is currently the CEO of HandCash, while Seibane is the present CTO of the company. They said that the features of the application were inspired by an episode they have seen of the Black Mirror television series featuring contactless payments, and their efforts to turn such depictions into reality led to the conception of the HandCash application.
The partners behind HandCash were at first astonished with the capabilities of Bitcoin as cryptocurrency and its flexibility for different kinds of online transactions. However, one problem they noticed was that users of Bitcoin were still dealing with “raw material.”
Agut related the situation to the versatility of aluminum for different ways of using it and how consumers easily prefer the material. Still, they would not buy chunks of the raw material and instead purchase already processed aluminum for its intended uses. The company behind HandCash recognized the need for tertiary sectors to step into the Bitcoin scene and continue to make the cryptocurrency become accessible to more users and make the technology increasingly less complicated.
The app features several in-app capabilities other than making contactless payments to other users, such as in-app top-ups. The company has partnered with a third-party service offering top-ups at minimal costs. As of posting, this feature is not yet available and is still pending implementation.
The HandCash app also features the Paymail feature across all services in the Bitcoin SV ecosystem, this capability being one of the main hallmarks of the application as a user-friendly Bitcoin wallet. Paymail is a collection of protocols for Bitcoin SV wallets that allow for a set of simplified experiences to be delivered across all wallets in the ecosystem.
This feature no longer requires long address codes to implement transactions but allows user-friendly payment destinations through memorable handles. It also features permissionless implementation, automatic service location discovery, security and policy management, and request and response authentication, among others.
The application allows users to save contacts as “Friends” and also create their own profiles. In sending Bitcoin, the fiat amount sent is recorded along with the Bitcoin SV exchange rate at the same time. Users would see the fiat amount they sent and witness as time passes how the amount increases or decreases in value over time. Users are also protected with live fraud protection, which ensures that no funds are stored on the device. All funds go directly to a designated HandCash username.
The application is one of several efforts of working towards an ecosystem without Bitcoin addresses, where all transactions are private and P2P, and the HandCash application slowly adapts to this trend in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Several more security and technical features highlight the effectiveness of HandCash to become the most user-friendly Bitcoin wallet around and further invigorate competition in the market. In the end, the company relates the usage of HandCash with storing money in a shoebox versus inside a safe. The shoe box depends on the capability of the user to protect his possessions, but the safe only requires the user to validate their password privately.
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