最新报道：According to the news from the Bitcoin World Network, the international Bitcoin gift card company Azteco has announced a series of partnerships with digital gift card distributors, which will unlock 598 million new potential buyers, and the potential customers are expected to reach 1.3 billion as the distribution agreement continues to roll out. "We are turning Bitcoin from a noun into a verb, so that you can Bitcoin it," said Akin Fernandez, founder of Azteco, in an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine. The company first appeared in Bitcoin in 2014 and has been focusing on providing banking services to people without bank accounts in developing countries for more than a decade, with Bitcoin gift cards or vouchers being the preferred technology. The new partnership includes video game software and hardware company Razor, which, according to Fernandez, currently has 240 million tech-savvy customers. Other distribution partnerships focus on Brazil, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including Enterative® LIVE (estimated 30 million customers); DTOne (estimated 190 million customers worldwide); KaBum! (8 million customers); and PicPay (which just passed a compliance audit and is expected to unlock an additional 60 million users in Brazil), shared Fernandez. “Bitcoin has all the utility of a currency, and it’s an absolutely massive market, the size of which makes the current price of bitcoin completely unjustifiable,” added Fernandez, discussing the potential market size of Bitcoin. Having initially raised $6 million in seed funding from a number of angel investors, including Jack Dorsey, Azteco has now launched a new seed extension round targeting $4 million to fund expansion. "My contribution to Azteco stems from my deep respect for their mission. The unbanked population is huge. We have the technology and resources to bridge that gap, but until now, no one has taken the important next step. Azteco is providing more than just access to a secure financial system; it is building an ecosystem of financial self-determination securely supported by local communities. I am honored to support them." - Jack Dorsey, Block. Banking the unbanked, a popular slogan among the older generation of Bitcoin enthusiasts, is still alive and well at Azteco. Andreas Antonopoulos popularized this Bitcoin mission statement around 2014, highlighting the huge gap in access to financial services and technology between Western elites like New York or London and the rest of the world. The unbanked often lack basic access to long-distance financial channels, affordable credit, and the relative security of a regular bank account. Proponents of banking the unbanked as a clear use case for Bitcoin believe that as a technology it can go further than banks because it does not need to identify its users; bitcoin can simply function as a bearer asset regardless of who controls it or where in the world it is sent from. The proliferation of basic telecommunications infrastructure such as cheap cell phones and text messaging has allowed new implementations of Bitcoin to exist and function in environments where traditional Western banks simply cannot justify the costs of administration and onboarding. "Experience the future of money. Get a glimpse into exciting technology. See what money will look like in the future and realize how limited money and banks are today. For the 'other 6 billion' who don't have the same international, control-free banking services we do, bitcoin represents an opportunity to become part of a global economy that has not existed until now. For these users, bitcoin is more than just a curiosity, it could be a gateway to the world." - Antonoplous, 2015. This vision of Bitcoin began to be challenged as transaction fees for sending BTC on-chain began to soar around 2017, leading to the infamous block size war and the resulting construction of the Lightning Network. Azteco vouchers were first available for purchase in 2014. Fast forward to 2025, and Azteco has upgraded its technology from natively using Bitcoin on-chain addresses in its vouchers in 2014 to adding Lightning Network support through compatible applications such as Wallet of Satoshi, Muun, or Blink via the LNURL standard. Azteco’s deep experience with the Bitcoin technology stack speaks for itself in their designs today, which remove incredible friction from the normal way of buying bitcoin and deliver it in a beautiful package. Not only does Fernandez make an economic argument for serving the unbanked and underbanked populations that are out of reach of the traditional banking system, but he also distinguishes between ethical and unethical bitcoin along the same lines. In an unpublished document shared with Bitcoin Magazine, Fernandez wrote: “What is ‘ethical Bitcoin’? It is best described by stating what it is not. It is unethical to tie a user’s identity to the funds they use or the content of the messages they send on the network. It is unethical to prevent people from using their money. It is unethical to spy on people and then use that information to control them. It is unethical to arbitrarily prevent people from selling goods and services.”With this statement, Fernandez rails against the fundamental structural differences between traditional finance and Bitcoin. Censorship resistance; the confidence that users can access their accounts and transfer value without personal information, regardless of which way the political winds blow — this is Bitcoin’s killer app. This is in stark contrast to the mentality of the popular Bitcoin generation, who, in internet parlance, seem to care primarily only about NGU (“digital up”), even if it comes in the form of an ETF or a bitcoin treasury company. There’s nothing wrong with that, but perhaps this generation of Bitcoin enthusiasts has either forgotten or hasn’t been exposed to enough of Andreas Antonopoulos’s content. They may not realize what a large portion of the global market is excluded from traditional finance, and how many people are unbanked. Azteco’s argument is far from merely ideological; there’s a massive market at play here. Focusing on the prepaid mobile phone data market, Fernandez notes that “there are 3.4 billion prepaid mobile smartphone users worldwide.” This means that nearly half of the world’s population has access to a smartphone and has become accustomed to “temporarily” topping up their phones, including through various digital vouchers. Every user of the internet network will be able to install “Wallet of Satoshi, Proton Wallet, Blockstream App, or BitKey; all they have to do is spend 30 seconds installing it on their Android or iPhone,” he added. Fernandez said bitcoin’s utility to them is no different than sending a WhatsApp message, which allows billions of people in developing countries to coordinate across long distances every day at near-zero cost. Bitcoin unlocks the same speed, but for transferring monetary value, whether for payments or remittances, while also serving as an easily accessible safe haven asset against their local fiat currencies — most of which are trending toward zero compared to bitcoin. Fernandez noted, “The remittance market is very, very large, worth $782 billion a year. Imagine we take, I don’t know, 12% or 15% of that and move it all to bitcoin. That would be a super disruptive event.” ” He added, “Just like in WhatsApp, if you have a family of 15 people and you put them all on Wallet of Satoshi or Blockstream Wallet, then all of a sudden you have a lot of people moving bitcoin back and forth, and they all need to be fed with bitcoin.” The question, of course, is: how are they going to get bitcoin? “If they’re not American or European, first of all, it’s very difficult to get bitcoin through exchanges. Second, it’s very slow and invasive of privacy. Azteco vouchers are much better for them because they can go to a place where they already buy video games or something like that, and they can buy a $25 voucher, or go to a supermarket and buy a $25 voucher. And then they can send their bitcoin to wherever they want. The use case again is currency. This isn’t just theoretical. Fernandez shared some sales figures from Azteco with Bitcoin Magazine, with around “500,000 vouchers” sold over the past few years, with the average value of the value transferred being around $280 to $315, and with a lot of $20 to $30 purchases. Bitcoin Magazine reports that in the first quarter of 2024, Azteco will have sold vouchers to 1 million people worldwide since its inception, suggesting that interest in developing countries has accelerated in recent years. Fernandez believes these numbers can be much larger, and that the key barrier to growing this market is user experience. “I mean, we’re all at an all-time high right now, which is $123,034, but imagine if the entire world, just people with cell phones, used bitcoin as a currency to send to each other, save, and spend online; $123,034 is nothing compared to the size of the market. But none of this would happen if bitcoin was hard to get. It has to be incredibly easy to get, as easy as topping up your phone to make calls,” Fernandez concluded.