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Abra (A Better Remittance App) is a new wallet and money transfer application. The CEO, Bill Barhydt, is a former director at Netscape and is also credited with the first TED Talk on bitcoin. Remittance has been all the rage lately (WorldRemit and Transferwise) now the crypto community is looking to join the party. Abra is backed by RRE, First Round Capital, Lerer and Mesa+.
The announcement, which came on the final day of Launch Festival 2015, ends seven months of silence for the stealth project. Barhydt previously founded mobile banking startup Boom Financial, which raised $17m in 2012, and WebSentric, one of the first online meeting services. Speaking at the event, Barhydt explained that the goal of Abra is to attack the $550bn global remittance market by reducing its associated fees. For ease of use, the app uses bitcoin in the back end to facilitate peer-to-peer transactions, but denominates all transactions in US dollars. Barhydt said: "Our mission with Abra is to turn every smartphone into a teller that processes withdrawals. This is not just another bitcoin app. The wallet is a full-fledged digital asset management system, and you don't have to understand it. It's very sophisticated what's going on behind the scenes."
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