Why a Simple Payments App is Integral to the Success of Terra’s Blockchain

How CHAI is leading Terra to the moon.

Photo by CardMapr.nl on Unsplash

In today’s world pushing toward a crypto economy, there remains a wide gap between the blockchain industry and the mainstream economy. For the most part, digital assets have grown popular as speculative bets and not much more than that. Their utility and widespread adoption are still far-reaching.

Largely, this is because blockchain developers continue to build ideas for those already heavily engaged with cryptocurrencies. Products that benefit digital asset investors but not the everyday consumer. Very few projects have gotten to a point of real-world adaption such as an online payments system or — dare I get impatient — offline transactions.

It is a widespread belief that cryptocurrencies will never reach the mainstream economy until they can reach a point of everyday-real-world-use-case. Fortunately, there are some blockchains trying to make this a reality.

In this article, I will zoom in on the Terra blockchain and how they have seamlessly blended crypto transactions into the real economy without front-end users even noticing — and why this sort of strategic approach is necessary for the masses.

What is CHAI?

CHAI is a Korean mobile payments service similar to PayPal. With the app downloaded, a user can connect their bank account and make online payments simple and convenient.

Terra + CHAI

All the way back in the summer of 2019, Terra proudly announced the breakthrough partnership with CHAI.

At the time, CHAI had recently gone live on TMON — one of the largest eCommerce platforms in the world with 10 million users and $3.5 billion in gross merchandise value. This partnership made CHAI available to all of Terra’s eCommerce partners.

Equally exciting, CHAI was then partnered with 15 of the largest local banks to facilitate easy on- and off-ramping. This meant Terra could potentially tap into a large portion of the Korean real-world economy.

For Terra, CHAI provides a payment gateway with merchants in fiat — where they can access the masses. For CHAI, Terra offers…