Here The Bitpagos, Which Is Now Ripio, Lands $1.9M Promoting Financial Inclusion Using Bitcoin

Introducing BitPagos

The current news is that the BitPagos, a Bitcoin and digital payments startup has closed a $ 1.9 million Series A round expanding its services in native South America. Here the round was led by China-based Huiyin Blockchain Ventures with participation from existing investors Digital Currency Group, Boost VC as well as Draper VC while the company was founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and previously raised undisclosed seed funding. 

Thereby it was known that BitPagos is also renaming itself to Ripio meaning gravel in Spanish. It is here that’s also the name of its consumer credit product, enabling those with limited banking history to get credit through the use of its consumer wallet services as CEO Sebastian Serrano says the name isn’t better suited for running a consumer business which is also more symbolic. He further explains that he grew up in Choele Choel, Rio Negra, in the Patagonia region where most of the roads were made of Ripio. Thereby Ripio is used in the country to open roads as they were opening roads for financial inclusion. Thereby Ripio plans to use the new funding to expand its services into Brazil and Mexico though initially its wallet service whereas later adding the credit system. Therefore Serrano said that it will hire local teams consisting of a few people in both countries that also double the size of its development team that numbers12.

It is here that the company aims to use digital currencies encouraging financial inclusion in South America with credit card ownership generally below 20 percent and many millions do not even have a bank account where indeed the World Bank concluded that there were people in the region still stashing money under their bed rather than depositing it in a bank. Hereby Ripio is aiming to change that by allowing users to buy online and elsewhere using its wallet app for Android and iOS version that is planned. In such a case once a user has built up a spending history the company is sure to use that data as credit history helping them take microloans or other kinds of financial services ordinarily out of their reach.

Consequently the CEO of Huiyin Blockchain Venture James Wo, the firm is backing Ripio as of shared goal to create financial solutions and accessible tools that can help define and expand the new digital economy. It was according to Serrano that the bitcoin’s recent surge where the cryptocurrency is currently valued above $ 1000 per coin for the first time in three years helping generate interest in the Ripio wallet app. Furthermore, it is found that it is the service’s active user thereby increasing 40 percent after estimating that Ripio’s two services combined will process several million US dollars and it also provides a more precise figure for its business or the users at this time. 

How Is Userfeeds Aiming To Stop Fake News By Linking The Blockchain To Social Content 

To mention a few of the major contributors, here is Userfeeds a new startup that has a platform applying blockchain tokens to news discovery where the idea is to combat so-called fake news providing an economic incentive to rank content well. Here the Warsaw-based company has raised $ 800k in seed funding from BlueYard Capital, Fred Ehrsamh (the Coinbase co-founder), and Piotr Smolen (Dataventures).

Here the system of content ranking and discovery on the web using links, likes, upvotes, etc., comes broken because of the algorithm gamed by third parties. Thereby changing what you see on social media. To contribute to the entirety this is where it has meant those platforms like Facebook ranking fake news higher than real news as it has also come as more sensational than boring and complex reality.

Therefore Userfeeds is applying the principles as well as methods of Bitcoin and Ethereum crafting transparent and publicly auditable content networks as well as ranking algorithms using digital tokens as ranking signals in plain English meaning creating an audit trail to content using the blockchain.

Later on, it was mentioned that in the case of the first product Userfeeds Engine, it allows users, developers, and publishers to run custom rankings to produce search results information feeds, recommendation systems, top10 lists, and sponsored links. This then allows new business models for publishers and application developers outside of advertising and subscriptions potentially improving organic content discovery for audiences that don’t rely on easily abused social media signals that are similar to links, likes, votes, etc.

The Bottom-Line

This blockchain-based product also creates natural economic barriers that can prevent trolling, spam, and cost-free abuse. The team, therefore, consists of Maciej Olpinski, cofounder, and CEO working for Google, and YouTube in their ad product and business organizations. Therefore it was Greg Kapkowski the co-founder and CTO a senior software engineer with experience and patents in metadata aggregation algorithms.