Luno, a London-based bitcoin company with operations in Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Africa and United Kingdom said its user base topped 1 million last week.
In an email chat with BusinessDay, Luno’s country manager Owenize Odia said that while one million customers downloaded the company’s wallet in November 2017, about 500,000 are actively using the platform on a monthly basis.
Also, about a third of the users are regularly buying and selling digital currencies.
“Our active user rates are quite high because of our strong mobile offering and also only being in markets where we can provide essential value add services (example buying and selling versus just digital currency wallet,” Odia said.
The new customer base is spread across Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa.
Luno recently added Ethereum on their wallet. Adding ether came in the wake of securing $9 million Series B from new investors.
“It is core to our beliefs that decentralised digital currency will form the basis of the future of finance” said Marcus Swanepoel, co-founder and CEO at Luno. “Our mission at Luno is to bring digital currencies to everyone, everywhere. It is our view that we will end up with a multi-digital currency world and Ethereum is aligned with this view.”
Price of virtual currencies has witnessed several all-time-highs since the month of October. It hit the highest in the last week of November as prices went beyond $10,000 and $11,000. It dropped 20 percent on the last day of November.
According to Odia, the rise in price of bitcoin has many things to do with the supply and demand of crypto.
“The supply side is fixed, so that is easy. On the demand side it is a combination of increasing institutional interest (and new instruments to help them get exposure like shorting and ETF’s), people learning a lot more about how digital currencies work and why it’s an important technology, the world economy looking somewhat shaky and people looking for alternative yield and exposure, the media generally being more objective about it.
“Most of it though is just word of mouth from one user to another and a general excitement around a new technology and way of thinking about the world. We have built a dedicated learning portal to help on the education front and will be adding a lot more content and videos here in the next few weeks, but happy to discuss more in the meantime if needed,” Odia said.
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