BSV Blockchain Association Case Study: HandCash

Dubbed ‘The BSV wallet you can recommend’, an intuitive user experience for services across the BSV ecosystem distinguish HandCash from the pack, as its Spanish development team works to make digital currencies a more accessible and frequent part of everyday life.

HandCash co-founder and CEO Alex Agut explains that they have been trying since day one to make digital assets and blockchain technology more appealing to everyone by focussing on the user experience.

‘One of the things that make us unique is the usability of our product. We put a real focus on having a clean user interface and a positive user experience right from the first setup. It’s easy and it’s reliable, which is what people really like about HandCash.’

The HandCash suite of products offers a range of ways to interact with the BSV blockchain, with the HandCash wallet providing a sleek and feature-packed application for end-users, while HandCash Connect combines a suite of tools for businesses and developers looking to integrate their product with BSV.

‘I think that there are going to be a lot of new business use cases that BSV will allow for thanks to micropayments, as well as features like encryption and tokenization – there’s a world of options that this technology can open up,’ explains Agut.

‘But we need to make BSV accessible to developers and consumers. HandCash is the user-friendly solution for both sides of the blockchain, making it easier to use and integrate than ever before.’

The HandCash wallet offers an easy and attractive entry point for consumers looking to leverage the BSV network for peer-to-peer transactions, but it is in the enterprise tools that complete the payments infrastructure where HandCash is hoping to use BSV to make a difference.

‘Working with BSV, it was obvious to us that you didn’t want to try to out-Visa Visa – it’s not going to happen because they have a huge infrastructure, strong margins, and a great business,’ says Agut.

‘Where the BSV blockchain can outcompete Visa is in micropayments. Visa are not able to offer cost-effective cross border micropayments and that is something that we can offer. That’s what we saw as our niche – micropayments for apps.’

Bitcoin payments for enterprise

HandCash Connect is a fast and flexible solution that allows businesses to create their platforms on top of the BSV blockchain with minimum effort.

‘HandCash Connect is a solution that integrates BSV in the back-end, which gives you complete freedom to build on top of any platform, but more importantly, to build native apps,’ explains HandCash CTO Rafael Jiménez Seibane.

The HandCash Connect toolkit is an all-in-one software development kit (SDK) that enables new blockchain-based functionalities for business, including instant payments, promised payments, identity, login, blockchain data and ownership.

‘For any of these different modules, all that is required is a very simple snippet that is written almost in plain English. Any developers who want to use it don’t need to go through the process of learning BSV – they can focus on building their apps,’ says Seibane.

‘No more jargon, no more distractions – HandCash Connect is about being able to focus on building your own project. You create the best product that you can possibly build, we take care of the rest.’

Using the BSV blockchain as a platform for enabling new digital business models speaks to the core of the HandCash value offering, which is based on a market demand identified by the founders when they were developing a different product entirely.

‘We think this is a very important initiative because of our own experience [trying to integrate blockchain payments into an app] back in 2015, where there was no ready-made SDK or set of APIs that we could just plug and play into our application to add micropayments or payments,’ explains Agut.

‘Businesses shouldn’t need to retrain their programmers to learn BSV or its scripting language to use it with their products. With HandCash Connect they don’t have to; we have made it so that it’s as simple as using our API calls to connect to our infrastructure.’

When initially devising HandCash, the team was working towards building a product that achieved an end-vision, as opposed to developing a product specifically for a certain blockchain or platform. But problems with fee structure and a lack of predictability on competing blockchains meant that BSV was the only option that offered a viable solution.

‘The problem that we had with [other blockchains] was that the fees were terrible because you didn’t have any. There was no reliability and that’s a major problem. With BSV, you know that the network is going to work tomorrow exactly the same way that it worked today. But most importantly for us, the fees are going to be more or less the same, so we have real reliability there,’ says Agut.

‘With BSV, the code is very good, it works well, and it scales. But I think the best thing you have is the business environment – that is the meaningful development on the platform and making the node work better – which is so important because it shows to companies that this is being taken seriously over the long run.’