Not Just Venezuela! How DASH Penetrates into Thai Market?
Exclusive Interview with Felix Mago: Part 1
When DASH is usually reminiscent of hyper-inflation in Venezuela, the development of DASH in Asia, especially Thailand, can be much faster than you thought! We have the privilege to speak with Felix Mago, CEO of DASH Thailand, to share his insights on how DASH penetrates into the Thai market differently from Venezuela. He also highlights the importance of merchant’s adoption for DASH to go viral!
As a German, what makes you come all the way to Thailand and work for DASH ?
I began my blockchain career in 2013 by writing a book on how you buy and that was the time when it was very cumbersome to get into cryptocurrency. I used to live in Thailand 10 years ago and I commuted between Germany and Thailand. When I worked in Germany and observed the blockchain space as a whole, the Asian market could be very interesting. There are a lot of things happening and you were not aware of it if you work in Germany, Europe or in the United States. Looking at the Thai government and you will realize they’re very proactive in crypto regulation. This is why we thought Thailand can be our Asia entry point. We worked very closely with the DACH team, which is the German DASH entity. They helped us to get into DASH and we said that there is no Asian presence. We believe Thailand is a good entry point for us in Asia with its proactive regulations in cryptocurrencies.
We know that DASH is widely adopted in countries in Venezuela. How about Thailand? What are the different strategies you use to penetrate into Thailand and gain DASH adoption and build the ecosystem in Thailand?
A very interesting question! Hyperinflation is an awesome use case for any cryptocurrency. For Venezuela that is lack of crypto regulation, this means people can use DASH freely and we can have a very nice value proposition for the merchants. This is because we have a more stable and better currency than Bolívar soberano (VES) suffering from 1.4 million inflation rate. Nobody wants to hold VES because you can’t run a business out of it. That comes back to the point I said before that Asia is a huge market. Asia has many different countries with different regulations. For us, it’s important to gain the foothold as well as other different markets. This is why we feel it’s highly important for DASH to gain Asian exposure and not only focus on hyper-inflationary countries.
In Thailand, we have a totally different structure. In Thailand and most of the Asian countries, the currencies are stable with low inflation rate. Due to the fact that DASH is more volatile than most of the Asian , we have to take another approach. We chose Thailand as the starting point because Bangkok is the most visited cities in the world and it’s always in the top three. It is noteworthy that 20–25% of Thailand’s GDP is based on tourism. Tourism in Thailand presents huge gateways for DASH ‘s widespread adoption!
To leverage opportunities in Thai tourism, we start penetrating into merchant’s community. When we approach Thai merchants, we not only bring them an very active and huge crypto community in Thailand, but also tourists all over the world! In fact, the average persona of a crypto holder is an wealthy individual which is desirable for merchants. These crypto holders would like to stay away from fiat currencies and spend with crypto instead! This can be a new and huge revenue stream for traditional Thai merchants where they never access before! We not only provide merchants a new business stream, but also brand new marketing channels! If merchants work with us, they are invited to all our social media channels to post pictures on their restaurant and hotel. If merchants give promotions, they can even attract more wealthy customers! This is what businesses ultimately care about: a new and huge revenue stream for them! Gaining merchant’s adoption is where we started to grow DASH as an ecosystem.
I knew that DASH penetrated into Venezuelan market by gathering different communities with a lot of educational workshops. Does the same thing apply to DASH Thailand?
Yes and No, when we started off, there was zero DASH and in fact, zero crypto acceptance in Thailand. There are some shops claiming they accept bitcoins and we found out that these are not true. In fact, nobody really heard about cryptocurrency, it was rather an old dusty sticker on the door, where everybody was crazy about booming bitcoin price 3 years ago. But then nobody ever came and paid with Bitcoin.
We started off with a very virgin ecosystem with zero merchants and grow now to a nice, healthy and sustainable ecosystem. For me, this was the first step. Now we can go to the second step and say, “We want to have DASH actually everywhere in Thailand, and everywhere in Asia, of course, everywhere in the world!” When we gain more exposure in Thailand, the big players start approaching us. From chain stores, Point of Sale (POS) systems, to the banking giants, we are making more and more partnerships in Thailand, in Asia and on the global scale.
Elaborating on Thai merchants, what are the challenges in getting those merchants on board? For example, how do you integrate those existing POS systems in DASH?
There are many different angles which are very important. First of all, as I mentioned before, we have to show them that people come if they do it right, nobody will invest time or money to get this new solution into their systems, you don’t even have to integrate it into your payment systems, you also have to teach your staff how to use it. Besides, you have to constantly keep training your staff because of their turnover. There are many angles for a business to run. This is a very important thing that we go there and say “Hey, we have a very simple solution, you can use it.” This is a very important angle compared to Venezuela and these hyperinflation countries, every cryptocurrency is very volatile, we have to give options. We realized many merchants want to have fiat money at the end because they have to pay their bills and they have to run their business. Therefore, we have to give them an easy exit into fiat money if they wanted. I always offer by saying “You can decide whether you want to keep 0% in DASH or you want to keep 100% of DASH “. I would love to see everybody keeps dash. But for now, it’s just not realistic. This is where we have to give options.
Published at Tue, 23 Jul 2019 02:47:56 +0000
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