Where the Future of Crypto Payments Is Being Built

The Philippines is a collection of over 7,000 islands, where only 31 percent of its 100 million people are banked, and just 4 percent of transactions happen online, but nearly 60 percent of people own a smartphone.

One of the Philippines' incumbent financial institutions, UnionBank, is leading the way in blockchain experimentation, applying the technology to everything from internal distribution of operating manuals to digitizing the badly fragmented rural banking system, effectively bringing costly processes that previously took a few days into real-time.

Global Overseas Worker, or GOW, is a crypto exchange licensed by the Philippines Central Bank and Philippines SEC that is delivering up to 98 percent savings on the usual remittance fees copped by Filipinos.

19-year-old Kyle Acquino found inspiration in those strong Filipino family values to come up with the idea that won the Accenture Choice Award at DISH 2018, the Philippines' first-ever community-led blockchain hackathon.

"I tapped into that mindset and came up with the idea to provide a platform where communities can grow together like a family," says Acquino, who is studying Computer Science at the Technological University of the Philippines.

"Blockchains are not all encompassing in terms of features," commented Chris Verceles, CTO of decentralized disaster-response startup LifeMesh, developer at ConsenSys Philippines and one of the main organisers of the hackathon.

Growth data reveals that enterprises are outsourcing talent to companies like Cloudstaff more and more, with 1.3mil people now employed by BPOs in the Philippines.

"You can see this in the current scramble for blockchain talent, where companies are increasingly looking into the Philippines for more abundant developer resources."

Milburn agrees, musing that "The Philippines community seems to be focused on the utility of the blockchain, more than the typical speculation and gambling we see in so many markets."

In the short time we've been stationed here in the Philippines, the blockchain community has welcomed us with open arms.