Bernhard Müller: Centi is for people who don’t care about Bitcoin
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Bernhard Müller, CEO and founder of BSV payment processor Centi, believes the key to creating a popular, scalable product is to ensure that everyone will be able to use it, not just people interested in Bitcoin.
“We really want to design a product for everyone, my mother, my brother, my uncle, anyone who doesn’t know about Bitcoin, who doesn’t even care about Bitcoin,” he says.
He believes that Centi’s simplicity will be its USP and will enable it to roll out to a variety of different customers who haven’t necessarily used Bitcoin or integrated it into their business model before.
For example, he tells Charles Miller in this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations that he is targeting the media and events industry, through the launch of the Centis ‘room concept.’ This feature will allow merchants to customize pages on the app so users can purchase tickets and merchandise quickly and easily online.
“For example, if you want to sell a consumer a hamburger at the event, you can basically buy the product digitally, directly in the app, and then you just have to go and pick it up instead of standing in line somewhere.”
The peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin helps ensure that transactions are extremely fast and direct, and if both customer and seller have Centi enabled, the funds go straight from one to the other, without traveling through any custodians or intermediaries.
So far, there are three onboard merchants using the service commercially; one is a bar, one is a noodle shop and one is a clothing store, but Bernhard hopes to have at least a thousand merchants by the end of 2023.
Although this may sound ambitious, he explains that they already have strategies in place to work with other partners who already have a long list of clients.
He also hopes that the simplicity of the product, thanks to a recent redesign, will prove to be a winning combination for commercial customers. But just in case that wasn’t enough to attract new users, he has integrated a faucet into the app.
This means that anyone using the Centi app can receive 1 Swiss franc (about 1 USD) just for signing up. Bernhard explains that faucets were big in Bitcoin in the early days and are aimed at getting people to experience the product without having to connect their finances to the app.
He is excited about the potential he sees to get outsiders involved in Bitcoin SV and refers to the BSV Global Blockchain Convention as an example of how many opportunities there are, especially compared to how it used to be.
“The first conference we had in London after this whole split ordeal between BSV and BCH happened, I mean, it was a small group of people, I don’t know maybe a hundred, two hundred people that were there and now this has grown significantly with everyone these ambassadors and Block Dojos and Citadels.”
Listen to Bernhard Müller’s full interview in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations podcast or catch up on other recent episodes:
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