Amber, the brainchild of Aleksandar Svetski, will open up bitcoin to everyday Australians to give exposure to a world first asset.
“A new asset class has emerged and what’s interesting about bitcoin is that it’s the first time we've been able to create digital scarcity. We've never been able to have that before,” he said.
Mr Svetski said that bitcoin as an asset was un-confiscatable, un-inflatable and un-compromisable which made it unlike many assets.
“Bitcoin is digital gold as it’s a bearer asset, when you hold it, it's yours much like holding a bar of gold. It’s an interesting place to store value and as a result of that capital comes onto bitcoin in waves,” he said.
It’s no secret that bitcoin has been volatile with large highs and subsequent crashes reported frequently by the media, but Mr Svetski said that brought in more people and capital.
“Bitcoin is finite in supply so its simple supply and demand economics. You have a very secure network which has a finite supply of units, the more capital on the network the more the unit price increases.
“If more capital continues to flow on the network then it’s going to go up in value,” said Mr Svetski.
Mr Svetski strongly believes that everyone should hold bitcoin and the purpose behind Amber was to make it easy.
“Amber will make that exposure easy. Download the app, link the account and then you can use us as an exchange and a wallet and a microinvestment app that helps you get exposure,” he said.
Amber is currently in its second funding round after a successful million-dollar seed round last year.
“The most noteworthy investor was Queensland University of Technology (QUT), which makes us the first crypto company in the country to have a university actually put money directly into us,” Mr Svetski said.
As part of that round, he said that Amber sold equity in the company rather than ICO’s as they wanted to give investors something of worth.
“We were against the ICOs as those tokens are all worthless, so we sold equity in the company. We did it right when everyone thought we couldn’t, right in the heat of the bear market,” Mr Svetski said.
This year Amber seeks to raise $3-5 million in capital, with a launch set for June with more features and products on the way, said Mr Svetski.
“We want to be that frictionless on-ramp to bitcoin. As more people join the app and use the utility aspect of it, they can use bitcoin but initially it is about giving people that exposure,” he said.