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The piece of tech we were looking forward to getting our hands on most when moving from Australia to America?
Venmo.
Sounds weird, and honestly kinda anti-climatic — we know!
But having a single payment network that all of your friends and family use? It’s a game changer.
We used to have to split checks using bank transfers (yuck!).
Good news for Australians: the banking system eventually realized the opportunity to take that part of the market, and became ‘the Venmo of Australia’ in their own weird way.
They started by allowing users to text a one-click payment link to their friends (regardless of which bank they used) — and now, they’ve implemented their own version of Zelle.
We tell you this story, because we’re starting to see a similar transition take place in the crypto space.
Specifically: on Base.
You can now text one-click crypto-payment request links to your friends’ phone numbers.
Which is still clunky as heck — but it opens the door to a future where users can associate their phone numbers with their wallet addresses.
Reducing each user’s ‘send to’ address from a garbled string of 42 uppercase/lowercase letters and numbers, e.g:
0x1f9080aae28b8a3dceadf281b0f12828e676c326
…to a simple phone number — something everyone already has and understands — with no geo-locking.
We love to see it!
