Zhang Lei, founder of YeeCall: The demand for overseas remittances from immigrants pushes us to enter the blockchain industry

In 2014, the number of users of the instant messaging tool WhatsApp approached 1 billion; by the end of 2017, WeChat had 889 million active users, which shows the huge market size of instant messaging software.

YeeCall is a company that started from instant messaging. The difference is that YeeCall focuses on overseas immigrant groups, and has received investment from ZhenFund, Innovation Works, and Yida Capital. In the era of blockchain, YeeCall has also found greater opportunities.

Recently, Ear Finance has an exclusive interview with Zhang Lei, the founder of YeeCall, to listen to him tell the story behind YeeCall.

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Author take off

Veterans lead the team to "go to sea"

Zhang Lei is a technical background. He has worked for Huawei, Baidu and other companies. He has several entrepreneurial experiences and has rich experience in wireless search and mobile security. He has been researching blockchain technology since 2012, and has been involved in the planning of several digital wallets since 2014. He found that many people have a strong demand for technology, but they don't care much about the specific path of application landing. In the process of providing technical support, Zhang Lei, a technical background, keenly discovered that the blockchain is redefining the rules of value transmission from the underlying transmission level, just like the TCP/IP protocol redefines the rules of information transmission to create the Internet. Likely to be the infrastructure of the next era.

YeeCall began to go overseas in 2015. The communication field was monopolized by WeChat in China at that time. Benefiting from the successful experience of Dim Sum Mobile going overseas, YeeCall keenly found that the Internet in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa and other countries and regions were booming. He and his partners decided to develop This blue ocean.

As a mobile communication application, YeeCall has unique advantages in voice and video calls in addition to basic image and text transmission. As we all know, long-distance transmission of images and voice often has a high packet loss rate. YeeCall can keep data smooth and uninterrupted under the condition of 70% packet loss. This feature allows YeeCall to quickly establish a reputation among immigrants in the Middle East and Africa. At the same time, the migration of these people brings YeeCall back to its home country. After accumulation, YeeCall now has 33 million overseas users.

Transfer demand emerges

Slowly, the YeeCall team began to receive feedback on various needs of users. Financial needs are one of the strongest. Since most YeeCall users are overseas immigrants, they send money home every two weeks or every month, and transfer money to immigrants. needs emerged.

The global cross-border payment market has a market capacity of about 600-700 billion US dollars, and generally charges 8-10% of the handling fee, so the handling fee market is 60 billion US dollars. But this cross-border transfer has two characteristics:

The first is that there is no company in the world that can take all of this market, because it is extremely complicated to get through the network with banks all over the world. The second feature is that this market is basically occupied by small and high-frequency remittances, such as remittance of 10,000 US dollars, the handling fee may be 50 US dollars, and the handling fee of 300 US dollars is still 50 US dollars. Most of the participants in these small remittances are immigrant groups working overseas, and the high handling fee is a headache.

At that time, Zhang Lei studied two sets of transfer schemes. The first was the cooperation of the existing banking system. Later, he found that the cost was extremely high, and the financial systems in different places were different, making it difficult to implement. Another solution is to use blockchain technology to achieve peer-to-peer cross-border transfers, which is the YeeCall wallet that everyone sees now.

Before starting to develop the wallet, the YeeCall team conducted a detailed survey of users, and found that users in Southeast Asia and the Middle East have a high acceptance of digital currency, which is much higher than that of domestic users in China. "60% of users have heard of digital currency, and 30% of these 60% users have digital currency." Zhang Lei revealed. However, it is still very primitive for Southeast Asian users to use Bitcoin for cross-border transfers. Taking the Philippines as an example, a large number of Filipino maids working overseas need to remit money to their Filipino family members. Families, Filipinos, post on forums or other occasions for over-the-counter transactions, and Philippine peso holders go to specific locations for face-to-face transactions. As you can imagine, this transaction chain is still very long. YeeCall hopes to lower the transfer threshold through blockchain technology. YeeCall uses YEE Token for peer-to-peer transfers, and directly converts it into local currency through the payment gateway. It only takes three steps to solve complex cross-border transfer problems. Better Meet the transfer needs of cross-border people.

Once the transfer scenario is opened, YeeCall's immigrant users will be activated quickly. At the same time, under the power of word of mouth, it will spread rapidly in the immigrant circle, and more and more people will be willing to use YeeCall. But cross-border transfer is only a part of YeeCall's ecology, and YeeCall has bigger ambitions.

Wallets are ecological containers

Zhang Lei believes that wallets are in the middle layer in the blockchain ecology and belong to ecological containers.

This year, YeeCall will launch three functions of payment, transfer, and red envelopes, and then implement more vertical scenarios, such as group red envelopes, payment groups, rewards, rewards for virtual items, cross-border transfers of digital currency and different legal currencies, etc.

Although many users already have some understanding of digital currency, complex concepts such as private keys are still beyond the grasp of ordinary users, and a simple, convenient wallet that supports all currencies can easily manage digital currency and become "Super entry to digital assets". When users have various tokens in their wallets, they need to have scenarios to consume these tokens. In the future, YeeCall will launch its own Dapp store, and users can download the digital currency-related applications they need.

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