EMERGING MARKETS
Who is Centbee, and why did you start the company? Lorien Gamaroff: Centbee is a Bitcoin SV payment company whose vision is making Bitcoin SV easy to use for everyone. We have several products available in the market today, which make it possible to buy, hold and spend Bitcoin SV. Before founding Centbee, I developed solutions for electrical smart grid utility companies and government organisations, and I noticed that these organisations often had challenges recovering their costs from their customers. I saw Bitcoin SV as a solution to this problem and developed the world’s first Bitcoin payment system for electricity. This solution was ahead of its time since at that stage; it was difficult for people to acquire and use Bitcoin SV. I decided to take a few steps back and start building an ecosystem that would make it easy for people to use Bitcoin SV as a payment system. I founded Bankymoon, an advisory and consulting company, in 2014 and spent several years educating corporates and governments on blockchains and cryptocurrency. I always had the intention of building a simple bitcoin wallet and payment solution and began working on the prototype of what would become Centbee. In 2016, I met Angus Brown, who had 20+ year’s experience in the payments and banking industry and together we started Centbee.
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You mention Bitcoin SV, why do you support that particular blockchain? Lorien Gamaroff: Bitcoin SV is the original design of bitcoin as developed by its inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. He intended to create a system that could be regulated and would be able to scale to billions of users. Over the years, several developer groups elected to fundamentally change the design of Bitcoin so that it would serve their purposes as an anonymous, unregulated system. At Centbee, we believe that a blockchain-based payment system can only succeed if it complies with all local rules and regulations around transparency and privacy. Only Bitcoin SV allows for massive, global utility as well as complying with KYC and AML rules.
