The Korea Blockchain Week kicked off on September 27. Terra has made its mark by making four game-changing announcements that will drive massive user adoption. The key to its massive growth has been its partnership with mobile payments dApp CHAI.
Today Terra made four huge announcements regarding CHAI in the Korea Blockchain Week:
- CHAI will launch a debit card with BC Card, the largest payment processor in Korea.
- CHAI will enable offline payments with CU, Korea’s largest convenience store chain.
- CHAI is now available on Yanolja – Korea’s number one hospitality app (think hotels.com).
- Terra partnered up with Shinsegae (SSG) Duty-Free and enabled global payments in Hong Kong.
Before exploring these announcements in detail, let’s gain a better understanding of Terra and CHAI.
What is Terra?
Terra’s primary mission is to encourage the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies by presenting merchants with an alternative and affordable financial system. On average, merchants are subjected to a 2-3% fee on every single transaction. This cost exists mostly to maintain an overly-complicated financial system, cluttered by institutions that no longer serve a crucial role. The blockchain technology can provide faster and more secure transactions at a fraction of the cost.
Terra is an algorithmic stablecoin that powers its blockchain payments network. By replacing the overtly complicated payment systems with a single blockchain layer, it is able to drop transaction fees to as low as 0.5%. It has already established some truly formidable e-commerce partnerships to help push adoption. These partnerships include Asia-Pacific giants such as TMON (e-commerce, Korea), Baemin (food delivery app, Korea), Carousell (C2C, SEA), Qoo10 (e-commerce, SEA), and Tiki (e-commerce, Vietnam). To date, it has 25+ partners who push over $50 billion in annual transaction volume.
What is CHAI?
As mentioned above, Terra’s payments dApp CHAI is primarily responsible for its explosive growth. CHAI is a Korean mobile payment service which is currently available on TMON – one of the largest eCommerce platforms in the country with 10 million users and $3.5 billion in GMV – and other mainstream online platforms. CHAI enables consumers to easily pay for items online by simply adding their bank account. Similar to the user experience of PayPal, CHAI has already partnered up with 15 major local banks to facilitate convenient fiat on- and off-ramp.
Within three months after launching, CHAI has gained over 430,000 users. In the process, it 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.
As a part of this partnership, Terra provides its blockchain technology through CHAI. Now, this is huge because mass adoption is one of its primary goals. CHAI has already proven itself as an extremely popular app that people are downloading and using. By leveraging this partnership, Terra will be able to introduce more people to blockchain technology.
Taking a Deeper Look into the Four Announcements
- CHAI and BC Card: BC Card, the largest payment processor in Korea, will collaborate with CHAI to launch a CHAI debit card by early 2020. The CHAI 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 and CU: CHAI will be launching offline payments with CU, Korea’s largest convenience store chain. People will be able to use the CHAI app to make payments at CU’s 14,000 retail locations, scattered across the nation.
- CHAI and Yanolja: CHAI is now available on Yanolja. Yanolja is the number one hospitality app in Korea and has over ten million users. It currently generates over $2 billion in GMV.
- Terra and Hong Kong: Terra has now partnered up with Shinsegae (SSG) Duty-Free to fuel global payments in Hong Kong. This will be done with a new localized app called “CHAI DF.” SSG Duty-Free is a market leader in Korea’s $17 billion duty-free shopping market. This market grew by a staggering 35% year-over-year in 2018.
The significance of the announcements
The first significant thing of note is that more and more online platforms are looking to integrate with CHAI. This is expected because CHAI has proven itself to be a solid mobile payments platform in a short amount of time. In fact, what its collaboration with CU shows us is that companies are willing to use CHAI for offline payments, significantly increasing its consumer touchpoints.
As CHAI starts becoming available in more and more places, Terra – by extension – will be available too. By leveraging this partnership, Terra is all set to become one of the most active blockchains in the world. If mainstream adoption is their end-goal then they are well on their way of doing so. The Terra team believes that they will hit an annual run rate of $1 billion by 2019.
Plus, the CHAI and BC Card partnership is going to make Terra virtually available to everyone. BC Card is South Korea’s biggest payment processing company. With this partnership, Terra’s blockchain payments will be available everywhere in Korea.
To summarize:
- CHAI’s reach keeps increasing thanks to its partnerships with online platforms.
- As a result, Terra’s blockchain payment networks will be available to more users.
- With more accessibility, Terra will soon become one of the busiest blockchain networks in the world.
Conclusion
Terra aims to drive mainstream crypto adoption, starting with Korea. The partnerships that it has announced so far have put it firmly in the driver seat to do so. Check Terra out at terra.money if you want to know more about the project.