Today, we are telling the story of a company in Brazil who started a venture mining Bitcoin. With this revenue the company, coinBR, grew their business to build a money application for Brazilians.
This application, SmartWallet, allows their users to pay utility bills, buy pre-paid credit for phones and even pay taxes.
We are delighted to hear that their most recent update includes support for Zcash! Now, users of SmartWallet can use the application or any one of the thousands of participating bank branches to purchase Zcash with Brazilian Reals. Users can also exchange Zcash back into Reals, which is a great opportunity to earn ZEC for income and use that income to pay utilities and taxes all within the same service.
Over the years, efficiently exchanging cryptocurrency into local fiat currencies has been one of the challanges of all blockchain ecosystems, but coinBR has provided a solution to this in Brazil. When considering the global, borderless properties of Zcash and ongoing demand for remittance markets, this is a key feature we hope to see addressed in more parts of the world.
Rocelo Lopes of coinBR says, “We chose Zcash to be the first new cryptocurrency added to our SmartWallet due to the technology behind it and as it is one of the fastest growing cryptocurrencies.”
In order to have the ZEC on hand to exchange for their customers, coinBR also added Zcash to their mining portfolio.
SmartWallet has 3000 users in Brazil and are expanding their services to South Africa on May 4th with more regions planned for launch later this year. We are excited about the growth of the Zcash ecosystem as a way to make fast, secure payments anywhere around the world. We welcome SmartWallet users into the Zcash community!
SmartWallet joins a growing list of third-party GUI applications supporting Zcash for users to choose from. Wallets considering adding Zcash support should reach out to us in email or by joining our community chat, we’d be happy to help!