The Bitcoin Bridge: With its new fiat on-ramps, HandCash goes back to its roots

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Every business goes through its ups and downs, and things will not always be smooth sailing. And as someone who is well versed in the tough competition in the digital currency space, HandCash CEO Alex Agut can personally attest to this. 

The leading BSV wallet provider is well known for its user-friendly interface and for making Bitcoin much more accessible to everyone. And now, HandCash has taken it even further, having announced the addition of fiat on-ramps that will allow users to top up their wallets from within the app using a credit card. 

In an interview with The Bitcoin Bridge, Agut reveals to Jon Southurst just how much work went into this new feature. He says the process involved going back to the very roots of HandCash and using this mindset for every decision.

“It came to a point where we internally were not very satisfied about HandCash in general, in the look and feel of the ecosystem,” the CEO said. “Everything felt a little bit rushed and bloated, and it was not us.” 

With their back-to-basics approach, Agut says they essentially stripped their product to its core and essence, and they were able to create something they are very proud of.

“Maybe it only does one or two things, but it does them very well,” he said.

‘We wanted to build a bridge’

The thrust behind the addition of fiat on-ramps to HandCash is the desire to free users from unnecessary complexity. Essentially, the company wanted to provide people with an easier way to get BSV right from inside the app.

Agut explains that developers simply cannot just remove complexity from the Bitcoin side. This would mean that people would still have to go to an external exchange where they would have to face complexity anyway. In other words, he says this is just moving the problem elsewhere and not really solving the problem to the fullest. 

“We wanted basically to have some rails to legacy payment systems [like] bank accounts, credit cards, PayPal, Mercado Pago, and all those payment systems are around the world,” Agut said. “We wanted to build a bridge so it’s easier for people that never had anything to do with Bitcoin to give it a try for the first time.” 

A big BTC screwup? 

Despite his company’s efforts to integrate legacy systems into HandCash, Agut says in an ideal world, people would simply transact using BSV.

Southurst remarked offhandedly that it seems that systems like Visa and Mastercard are “overcomplicating” and “politicizing” matters, and they’re making Bitcoin seem far simpler in comparison. 

Agut’s response came with a bit of laughter, the CEO commenting that integrating fiat payments into the app only reinforced the idea that things would be much better and easier if people simply dealt with BSV. After all, “legacy systems” are called that for a reason. 

“We’re basically adding this layer of legacy stuff,” Agut explains. “And it’s incredibly unreliable, incredibly prone to fraud, incredibly slow.”

So if older systems are so imperfect, why exactly haven’t they been replaced with newer, more reliable technologies? Why haven’t massive digital currencies such as BTC overtaken payment systems like Visa and Mastercard? 

Agut says the situation is understandable up to a certain point, because people are used to the older systems and migrating to newer systems is a very slow process. However, it cannot be denied that somehow, somewhere, people dropped the ball. 

“You really have to screw it with BTC in 2014, 2015 to not be able to replace this crap with BTC,” Agut remarked. “You really have to screw it big, and it has to be intentional. It’s obviously so much better—all this technology—than the fiat systems.” 

Find out more about what’s in store for the future of HandCash—and what its CEO thinks of the challenges they are facing— on The Bitcoin Bridge with Jon Southurst. Watch the full interview on the CoinGeek YouTube channel.