On April 2015, OneBit, a startup announced that it was developing a bitcoin wallet app that will allow the users to pay at any store with contactless mobile payments via the MasterCard PayPass payment network.As Hoenisch announced the news on Reddit three months ago, he even answered to many questions from the participants. When one participant asked if OneBit has zero fees, Hoenisch confirmed that it is.He stated,“You will be able to pay worldwide at market rates at any shop that accepts credit card via NFC!But before we launch OneBit we want to make sure that our security is top notch. And for that we are talking with a bunch of highly motivated investors to bring bitcoin main stream.
”At the moment, a new alpha version of the application is behind tested in various districts that Toby Hoenisch, the chief executive officer of the company believes will have the most use of it.MasterCard has assisted the company in securing a partnership with a card issuer, while OneBit was still being developed and funded.Toby Hoenisch stated, “To be clear: We don’t have [an] official partnership with Visa or MasterCard. But we also don’t need one.The risk would be that they force all of their thousands of issuing banks to stop doing business with bitcoin companies, the issuing banks are quite independent, and so I don’t see this [happening].
”Recently, Bitcoin Checkout, a point- of- sale app of BitPay has been nominated at the Contactless & Mobile Awards.The biggest advantage of using this app is the ability to pay using Near Field Communication or NFC.NFC- enabled PayPass payment terminals are very common in Europe and Singapore and is becoming increasingly common in Canada and Australia.Hence, it seems quite likely that OneBit will make the life of daily bitcoin users simple and reduce their dependency on exchanges.Hoenisch continued, “I am a serial entrepreneur and OneBit will be my 3rd company.
My background is AI, IT- security and cryptography.I have been fascinated by bitcoin for the last 3 years, but never quite found the right idea to form a company around until now.My co- founders have a background in UX & UI design and security and together we have a long history of building products.We managed to get MasterCard and DBS bank interested in OneBit and with their help, I am confident that we can build OneBit without getting burned like Charlie Shrem did.And yes, legal is the main reason we can’t just ship it…” .
