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Karbowanec a Ukrainian local altcoin used with mobile top ups

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Q: What can you tell us about your currency?

Karbowanec is Ukrainian local altcoin, based on CryptoNote technology. In Ukrainian language it’s called ‘Karbovanets’ but to make it easier to read and pronounce for worldwide users we use shortened name ‘Karbo’ and are shifting to this brand. Karbovanets was Ukrainian historical currency, now it’s obsolete, so we resurrected it in digital form, which is quite typical for many national cryptocurrencies. ‘Karbovanets’ is very well know word, with very strong associations with ‘money’ in Ukraine, also well known in Russia and other neighbouring countries. It sounds familiar to people, which makes it more easy to adopt.

Besides, the economical situation in Ukraine is catastrophic, given the huge inflation of official national currency Karbo might be an escape for citizens looking for a stable and growing decentralized alternative. That’s why we described ourselves as an altcoin – an alternative to official currency be it paper money or official cryptocurrency launched by government.

Q: What type of services exist or can we expect in the future?”

As a proof of capability and demo we made top up service, where people can top up their mobile phones for Karbo. It’s limited to Ukrainian networks at the moment, but we might enlarge it’s geography.

We’re making services for merchants which will enable them to accept Karbo as much easily and hassle free as we could do. We have significant progress, but these services are not ready yet to be revealed. We will announce and open them when they are ready.

Q: Are you targeting the consumer or Business Market? If so, how does the business model work?”

Primarily consumer market. As I said, we are developing payment gateways, and are going to engage as many merchants as possible to accept Karbo. We also put a lot of efforts to make wallets software easy to use, especially for general public unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies. We hope to make paying and accepting payments in Karbo easy and fun. Karbo is designated to be local currency for the benefits of local vendors and customers. We want to create an ecosystem around it. However, it’s not strictly geographical. Localism and national flavor doesn’t mean it can’t be used worldwide. Concerning business market, being private cryptocurrency, Karbo might be interesting for businesses if it will have active users and enough liquidity. It is because I don’t imagine making business using transparent blockchain to make payments for obvious reasons. Where people don’t care that someone’s tracking their payments, business wouldn’t want their competition to do so, for example.

Q: What are the details around the most important project you’re working on currently?

We made decent desktop wallet and constantly improve its functionality.  We are going to make Karbo wallets even more easy to use, convenient and intuitive. The CryptoNote tech gave us advantage in increased privacy but also problems and growing pains, other altcoins doesn’t have, – for CryptoNote there’s not much ready to use goodies available. We even had to make wallet software compatible with cyrillic ourselves – it even wasn’t working with non-latin letters, which was necessary for us, because in Ukraine cyrillic is used. Now our wallet is the only CryptoNote wallet fully compatible with cyrillic. As an example, where other altcoin based on Bitcoin gets mobile wallet as a heritage ready to use, we don’t have it and have to make it ourselves. This is one of our priorities too.

But now the most important for us is to get merchants on board. Without merchants that will accept Karbo, it will be just another coin for speculation on exchanges. Now we are focused on this – easy shopping with Karbo for both, customers and merchants.

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Q: How does the competition compare?

Karbo was started right before the rise of interest in privacy oriented currencies. What makes us different from other national altcoins is CryptoNote technology, that makes Karbo an anonymous coin. But anonymity in fact is a side effect. We decided to use this tech because we believe that privacy is a must for a currency which is targeted to be used as money. Thanks to CryptoNote, Karbo transactions are unlincable and untraceable, that gives Karbo very important feature that cash has, namely, – fungibility. It means that every Karbo coin has equal value and are interchangeable. This gives us advantages over other national cryptocurrencies and over Bitcoin. Moreover, Karbo can also be more familiar looking alternative to foreign and unknown Bitcoin in it’s target area. Especially comparing low fees, speed of transactions, and, most important, – fungibility and privacy.

Q: The market has many players, what differentiates you?”
The above mentiond, and the fact that Karbo was launched with zero premine, no worthless giveaways and airdrops, no ICO. And by now it has small but strong and developing community and userbase. And if we succeed – it will be thanks to our users. We are local currency, being actually used by people, not just by ‘investors’ and day traders for speculative purposes. And we’re going to go further in this direction.  Also Kabo has strictly monetary function, no any additional features, we don’t want it to be sonic screwdriver.
Q: Could you tell us more about your achievements in this?”

People top up phones for Karbo already. 🙂

Q: Could you tell us more about where you see Blockchain technology in the future?”

It’s disruptive technology, and can quickly and insensibly change our lives just like Internet did. We want to be part of this. We hope that open and transparent Blockchain used in government will change our country for better, in the same time, we believe that people have right to retain their privacy, including financial privacy, that’s why we hope that Karbo will be used for this purpose. We don’t like where so called ‘cashless society’ is heading with digital money, that’s why we propose an alternative with opaque blockchain. Digital, fungible, and private. And it’s not aboud buying drugs or tax evasion. Privacy and financial confidentiality just has to be provided by a cryptocurrency that aims to be actually used.

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