How will Terra disrupt the Payments & Blockchain Industry

Terra is a price-stable cryptocurrency that’s aiming for worldwide mainstream adoption via its mobile payments dApp, CHAI. Recently, during the Korea Blockchain Week, CHAI and Terra announced four game-changing partnerships:

• With BC Card – the largest payment processor in Korea – to launch a debit card called “CHAI card.”
• With CU – Korea’s largest convenience store chain – to enable offline payments.
• With Yanolja – Korea’s number one hospitality app (think hotels.com).
• With Shinsegae (SSG) Duty Free to enable global payments in Hong Kong.

It could be argued that these announcements have put Terra in the perfect position to completely dominate Korea’s thriving digital payments market. Before we further explore the importance of these four announcements, let’s understand what makes CHAI so unique.

CHAI’s Popularity

Consider the following facts:

• Within just three months post-launch, CHAI had already gained over 430,000 users and managed to outperform the more established KakaoPay in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
• CHAI has partnered up with 15 major local banks to facilitate convenient fiat on- and off-ramp.
• It is already available on various mainstream online platforms, including TMON. TMON is one of the largest eCommerce platforms in the country, with 10 million users and $3.5 billion in GMV.

If you are familiar with dApps then those numbers will seem unprecedented to you. The following are the top five dApps on Ethereum ranked according to the number of users it had in the last 24 hours.

According to the rankings, only two dApps (My Crypto Heroes and MakerDAO) managed to get more than 3,000 users, while the rest didn’t even manage to get 800. Unfortunately, this is true for almost all the dApps in the crypto space. The harsh reality is that most of them are struggling to get users into their ecosystem.

Keeping that in mind, the number of users and popularity that CHAI has managed to garner in such a short period is truly astounding. If we were to pinpoint the two main factors behind their rapid growth, they would be:

• User Experience.
• Terra’s Value Proposition.
• Strategic Partnerships.

User Experience

The key to the mainstream adoption of any technology is “abstraction.” Abstraction means that when you are interacting with a system, it should be as simple as possible. All the complexities and intricacies should be hidden from you in the background. Let’s take an example.

How do you interact with your car?

You simply switch it on and press the pedals. Right?

You don’t need to care about how the engine is interacting with the rest of your car, or how the pistons are operating within the engine. They are all running in the background and have nothing to do with the driver’s overall experience.

Similarly, CHAI also integrates a high degree of abstraction. Using CHAI is no different than using something like PayPal. Users can easily use it to pay for items only by just adding their bank account. As such, they won’t even be able to tell that they are using the blockchain. Plus, with the issuance of the CHAI debit card, users will be able to use it everywhere with just a simple swipe.

Terra’ Value Proposition

CHAI offers its users Terra’s blockchain technology through its interface Terra has been built to benefit both merchants and end-users.

• Merchants: Due to the complicated payment systems, merchants end up paying 2-3% transaction fees. Terra bypasses the need for multiple intermediaries with one single blockchain layer, to drop transaction fees to just 0.5%.
• End-user: As Terra keeps growing, the end-users will be able to enjoy a 5-10% discount rate for every transaction due to Terra’s clever stablecoin mechanics. As the Terra economy grows, they will be able to fund discounts with the money supply growth.

Terra’s value proposition has been instrumental in CHAI’s growth so far.

Strategic Partnerships

As mentioned, CHAI has already partnered up with 15 major local banks in Korea. Along with that, it is available on platforms like TMON. Terra itself has garnered over 25 partners who push over $50 billion in annual transaction volume. These numbers are impressive in itself, however, the bombshell that Terra dropped during the Korea Blockchain Week takes it to a whole new level.

• With BC Card, CHAI will be available to virtually everyone in Korea.
• CU is Korea’s largest convenience chain with over 14,000 retail stores. Enabling online payments here will greatly increase its customer touchpoints.
• Yanolja is the number one hospitality app in Korea and has over ten million users. It currently generates over $2 billion in GMV.
• 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.

Those are some scary stats and it just shows how smart Terra and CHAI have been with their partnerships. Since adoption is the name of the game, these partners will allow CHAI to be available to nearly everyone in Korea, both online and offline.

Conclusion – Will Korea actually run on Terra?

During the Korea Blockchain Week, Terra’s mission statement was – “Korea runs on Terra.” After seeing the amount of brilliant work that the team has done, it is really hard to think otherwise. With Terra’s insane value proposition and CHAI’s usability and popularity, there is no reason why they won’t be able to dominate the Korean market. It will be really exciting to see how they expand their operations in the near future.