Technical Update #2: Introducing BitcoinFundi RC1

Hello World,

We are proud to announce that BitcoinFundi Release Candidate One is now live.

Those of you that have been to our office, have probably heard us tell the story of how, when then US President Jack Kennedy visited NASA in 1962, he met a cleaner who was carrying a broom. The President then asked the cleaner what he was doing and in his response the cleaner said that his job was: “to put a man on the moon”.
At BitFinance our moon is to make it super easy for you to buy and sell bitcoin and BitcoinFundi RC1 is evidence of how hard the BitFinance team has been working to make it super easy for you to buy or sell bitcoin.

We are also happy to announce that, with this new release of BitcoinFundi RC1, we have now stepped out of beta testing.

Here are some of the improvements we have made in RC1:

  1. We have a cleaner, simpler interface for buying/selling bitcoin
    One of the biggest complaints we got from customers is that the interface for buying or selling bitcoin was too complicated and hard to learn. We’ve listened. We’ve removed all the clutter and complexities to create an interface for buying/selling bitcoin that is cleaner, simpler and intuitive.
  2. You no longer have to submit your proof-of-residence before you can buy your first bitcoin
    The proof-of-residence was a barrier for a lot of you. We’ve removed it. We’ll only ask for it when you are now doing large or frequent volumes. We’re still verifying your phone number and your email address before you buy your first bitcoin on BitcoinFundi though.
  3. BitcoinFundi RC1 to make it super easy easy for developers to build bitcoin-powered apps
    With BitcoinFundi RC1 we’ve introduced a public API that developers can access today without having to create API tokens for verification and with no limitations. If you’re working on a bitcoin-powered app and want help integrating it with BitcoinFundi, get in touch with Tawanda.
  4. We’ve introduced a 2% transaction fee
    We charge a 2% transaction fee the instant you buy or the instant you sell bitcoin. Deposits and withdrawals are still free. And creating a bitcoin wallet on BitcoinFundi will always be free.
  5. The minimum USD deposit is now $100
    Smaller deposits have too many overheads and as we introduce more deposit channels it gets expensive for us to keep deposits free. Increasing the minimum deposit was the only sustainable way forward.
    In addition, we are also proud to announce that we now accept deposits via RTGS/bank transfer. You can find our banking information on the deposit page on BitcoinFundi. If there is a deposit/withdrawal channel (by channel we mean bank or mobile money service) you would like to use that we don’t support right now then get in touch with Verengai. He can make it happen
  6. A Transaction History page
    You can now see all your transaction history in one place.
  7. Stellar Integration
    Stellar is a payment platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. We’ve integrated with Stellar to allow any of our users that are outside Zimbabwe to instantly lock the value of their bitcoin in USD — in case they are worried the price of bitcoin will fall while they are still holding on to their bitcoin.
    What’s interesting here is that you can lock the value of your bitcoin no matter where you are in the world. Before we had technologies like bitcoin or Stellar, it was no only difficult & expensive and move money & value from one country to another but you also had to adhere the many restrictions that were imposed by your Government or Central Bank which only made it more difficult to move money. cryptocurrencies have reduced the cost of moving money across borders to almost zero and have removed all the barriers we had before. 
    Technologies like Bitcoin and Stellar have made this world a better place.

Two more things: