At Unbounded Capital, we value Bitcoin (BSV) as a technology that will radically improve the lives of billions of daily users. In order for Bitcoin to realize this vision, we believe its progression needs to mirror aspects of the development of the internet. Like the protocols that comprise the internet, the Bitcoin protocol’s underlying complexity must be abstracted away to make it useful for non technical end users through a variety of user friendly applications. HandCash, a leading Bitcoin mobile wallet, shares this vision and summarizes it with their slogan “Bitcoin for the rest of us”.
Today, HandCash is popular as one of the most user-friendly mobile wallets for sending Bitcoin to friends. It boasts a user interface similar to popular fiat transfer applications like Cash App, Venmo, and Zelle. Perhaps most importantly, HandCash has significantly simplified the process of sending and receiving Bitcoin by replacing QR codes and long strings of hexadecimal characters with human readable usernames. Not only is the standard way of sending Bitcoin to a complex, case-sensitive address like “1BLjgzMR6jYhLEgiHCR7ZsBAN53gVWWBu7” ugly and burdensome, it also introduces the potential to easily send money to the wrong destination. With Bitcoin, the increased risk of accidents is more of a problem than with fiat transfer apps since the ability to simply reverse or cancel a transaction is much more difficult, and often effectively impossible. To reduce this risk, HandCash has implemented human readable payment handles like $Alice and $Bob which can optionally include profile images.
In addition to bringing modern UI to Bitcoin wallets, HandCash has also made significant advancements on the backend. HandCash (in collaboration with Money Button) has pioneered new standards for truly peer-to-peer transaction relaying between major transaction processors, a necessary step for enabling future scalability. Currently, most Bitcoin wallets scan the entire blockchain in order to identify transitions involving their users so that they can notify them about the received payment. While this is economically feasible with today’s relatively small blockchain size, the BSV ecosystems’ embrace of an unbounded blockchain makes this nonviable in the long run given its anticipated rate of future growth. Once the blockchain is computationally massive and rapidly growing, scanning each incoming transaction to see if it involves one of their customers will no longer make sense for most wallets. By using HandCash’s peer-to-peer standard and sending transactions directly to frequent peers in addition to broadcasting them to the Bitcoin mining network, participants in this new standard will be able to continue providing a quick and reliable user experience despite the growth of the database. For all of these reasons, HandCash has established themselves as an early and envelope-pushing Bitcoin company and have accrued one of the largest users bases for mobile Bitcoin wallets.
The next phase of HandCash’s product roadmap promises to continue improving Bitcoin’s usability, partially from the point of view of application development. With their upcoming developer SDK, HandCash Connect, they will provide Bitcoin app developers with a simplified development experience. By providing the tools necessary to build fully customizable Bitcoin applications without needing to code products from the ground up, HandCash will lower the bar and increase the attractiveness of developing new ways for users to benefit from Bitcoin’s unique functionality. By synergistically pairing their large base of Bitcoin users with an in-app marketplace for applications developed using HandCash Connect, HandCash will facilitate a virtuous cycle of Bitcoin value generation.
At Unbounded Capital we think that the BSV ecosystem’s rejection of dogmatic approaches to product development lends credibility to its future potential. By opting for pragmatism, like the embrace of massive scale, over the ideological purity of the crypto consensus, like the necessity for rigid decentralization, we think that BSV will enable the development of a new internet featuring products and services that billions will find valuable. This sentiment is exemplified by the HandCash team. By always prioritizing how HandCash can simplify the experience for end users and developers to interact with Bitcoin, they have already become a popular application for onboarding new users. We anticipate this trend continuing as HandCash’s product suite grows and continues to enable future Bitcoin developers and users to benefit from this revolutionary technology.