On May 4, The Times of India reported that Halsey Minor, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur and founder/CEO of BitReserve, engaged a meeting with the local regulators for the company’s future plans to launch its services there.
“After the U.S., U.K. and China, we want to now set up operations in India, and we are talking to regulators and potential partners on a range of our Internet-based finance offerings,” Minor told Times of India.
The aim of the launch in India is to provide users with “direct control of their money,” as Minor plans to offer BitReserve as a “financial inclusion product which can be used for money transfers.”
Officially launched in May of 2014, BitReserve is a bitcoin and fiat currency platform founded by Minor, the technology entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993. CNET is an American media website that publishes reviews, news, articles, blogs, podcasts and videos on technology which was acquired by CBS Corp. for $1.8 billion USD.
BitReserve is a Bitcoin service which was originally developed to protect merchants and users from bitcoin volatility.
“If you want to create something that is perceived as money, it’s going to have to represent the same value that people are using already,” Minor said at a news conference announcing BitReserve last May.
As a solution to the biggest problem for bitcoin merchants – price volatility – BitReserve allows users to hold bitcoin in stable currencies, such as the U.S. dollars, U.K. pounds, Chinese yuan, Japanese yen and Korean won.
Users can hold bitcoin in what BitReserve refers to as “currency cards,” and still send bitcoin around the network for free. Users can simply convert or transfer the BTCs to the preferred currency cards such as the dollar card, and avoid the price volatility of bitcoin. The fiat-to-fiat transfers are free of charge, and the users are charged only 0.45 percent for BTC to USD conversions.
Transactions on BitReserve are also processed faster, as the transactions are verified by the Bitcoin mining network after the primary verifications by BitReserve.
“Because we built a cloud-based service that’s debiting and crediting money, instead having a bunch of banks and processing companies in the middle, we can do this very quickly between accounts,” Minor explained.
Minor, the founder of CNET and technology entrepreneur, has invested in a variety of tech companies, including Salesforce, Open DNS, GrandCentral, Vignette and Rhapsody. Minor is currently the second-largest shareholder in salesforce.com, a company recognized as one of the most successful tech companies of the decade. Following the success of salesforce.com, Minor built Minor Ventures, and funded companies including Grand Central Communication and Open DNS.