Centbee Review

Centbee is a payment ecosystem company that is based in South Africa and that is developing a number of products for payments and remittances on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. Centbee offers a wallet that makes it convenient for users to store, spend and send Bitcoin (BSV) safely on their mobile phones. The app is available on the Google Play Store and App Store. Centbee doesn’t offer a desktop version of the Centbee wallet app.

Designed to make it easier for users in Africa and elsewhere to send and receive money, both domestically and overseas, Centbee is an innovator when it comes to practical Bitcoin adoption because with its over-the-counter crypto product, users can simply walk into virtually any major retail or franchise store in South Africa and are able to purchase crypto for cash using the Centbee wallet. 

Centbee Remit is a service from Centbee which can save users around 15% on their cross-border remittance fees while still being compliant with local policies and FATF guidelines. The first payment corridor was opened by Centbee and offers remittances between South Africa and Nigeria which are in fact the two largest economies in Africa. 

Centbee had its Beta launch back in October 2018 and since then they have gained over 30,000 registered users according to the company. Although still relatively unknown, Centbee is very innovative and quite easy to use and the innovations they have been able to integrate into Bitcoin (SV) are quite impressive. For example, with Centbee, the average person can be part of the digital currency ecosystem without having to deal with the complexities that come with using many blockchain powered apps and DApps that currently available – which don’t interact or aren’t integrated into the regular payment ecosystems, either because of the non-viability due to transaction fees being high for example or other reasons. For example, with the Centbee wallet South African locals can purchase prepaid Data, Airtime, Electricity & Gaming vouchers in app. Centbee also has a shop feature which makes it possible for users to buy from their favorite brands & stores from around the world. 

Some of the places you can shop with your Centbee wallet: 

Overview

• Users can still send Bitcoin SV to someone who doesn’t have a Centbee Wallet by simply sending the crypto to the recipient’s Bitcoin SV (BSV) receive address or scanning their Bitcoin SV QR code. 
• Users can use Centbee from anywhere in the world as long as they have a smart-phone with a SIM card. Centbee is based in South Africa and some of their ‘Top-up’ features currently only work in South Africa.
• Centbee also helps users set up merchant accounts and ensure that receipts are private, and settled daily into the user’s South African bank account. 
• Centbee offers a remittance service called Minit Money with the aim of facilitating cross-border payments instantly for under $1 per transaction.
• A Centbee wallet only works on one mobile phone at a time so it can’t be shared across multiple devices. Centbee wallets can be backed up using a 12-word backup phrase if you lose a device or simply want to move your wallet to a different device. 
• Centbee has a service called Paymail which allows users to send Bitcoin SV to paymail addresses. These look like regular email addresses, instead of complicated Bitcoin SV addresses. If you like this content for example you can send me some BSV to my address it’s: 14jLGJuKY1ZS32svhEYg9zRmQYNGwm6rrP and my Paymail is: hm@centbee.com 
• Users can also use Contact Pay which is a service from Centbee that allows users to stay connected and send Bitcoin SV to their contacts, family & friends, anywhere, anytime, using their mobile number, paymail address, and $handles. For example, my handle is $heathmuchena 
• Topping up your Centbee wallet using a local currency such as the South African Rand (ZAR) means that a user has to complete the KYC verification process. This process was quite frustrating for me as I kept getting errors and not quite sure if it’s a problem on the KYC service provider they use called liveness or an issue on the part of Centbee. 

I have had a Centbee wallet for quite some time and I think what they are bringing to the crypto space is sophisticated yet seamlessly integrated into legacy payment systems, bridging the gap between the old and the new by finding a scalable use case and promoting the use of Bitcoin (SV) for everyday payments. Centbee and Bitcoin SV demonstrate the use case for fast peer-to-peer electronic cash payments at the lowest fees conceivable.

The Centbee top up feature is available in over 150 countries. All a user needs to do is download the Centbee app and top up their wallet with Bitcoin SV using a credit or debit card directly in the app. The wallet is loaded within seconds. A user can simply click the ‘top up’ option on the wallet menu then select a country, choose whether they want to use a debit or credit card to top up. The amount has to be above US$69.48 to top up using fiat. Once the user confirms payment details and greenlights the payment, the equivalent Bitcoin SV will be credited to their wallet. 

Users can also send their Bitcoin SV that they purchase from another crypto exchange e.g. OKEx, Upbit, Huobi, FTX, or KuCoin and store it in the Centbee wallet, use it for making purchases and earning Bitcoin SV Honey rewards. 

Centbee also has another offering called ScanPay which makes it possible for merchants to accept payments using their mobile devices easily. It’s an easy-to-use app that staff can navigate effortlessly. 

In order to settle transactions in the merchant’s local currency and limit the merchant’s exposure to digital currency price volatility, Centbee converts the local currency price to Bitcoin SV, and then immediately converts the Bitcoin SV received to local currency for day-end deposit to the merchant’s bank account. Centbee also has reasonably low cash withdrawal fees.

Why Bitcoin SV?

Bitcoin SV (BSV) has the goal of fulfilling the original vision of the Bitcoin protocol and design as described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper. BSV offers scalability and is spurring the use of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system as well as facilitating the growth of enterprise-level advanced blockchain applications within its ecosystem. 

Bitcoin SV does not have artificial block size limits and can process tens of thousands of transactions per second while also managing to maintain minute transaction fees that are almost negligible and all of this is done on-chain, bringing transparency and still affording users their privacy. This year (2021), the BSV network mined the world’s first gigabyte (1000+ megabytes) level blocks which reached up to 2 GBs in August 2021. It is expected to continue to grow and accommodate more transactions per second. Currently Bitcoin SV is capable of handling more than 100,000 transactions per second.