Huobi and the MENA-regional online payments giant CASHU are making accessing cryptocurrency as easy as buying a Netflix subscription or paying a bill for millions of people across the often-underserved regions of North Africa and the Middle East.
Thanks to their new partnership, nearly 2.3 million CASHU users can now buy and sell Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and EOS (EOS) directly from CASHU’s mobile app. Users don’t need access to a bank account and can even pay in local currencies. Users on CASHU’s mobile app can make crypto transactions as easily and effortlessly as they would paying a bill or signing up for online services.
“A core part of Huobi’s mission has always been making global wealth more accessible so we’re excited to be taking this step with CASHU in furthering our mission,” said Livio Weng, CEO of Huobi Global.
The partnership with CASHU was led and managed by Huobi MENA, Huobi’s Dubai-based Middle Eastern, African, and Turkish branch. “The partnership between Huobi and CASHU is a unique business model that enables virtual digital assets trading to CASHU’s millions of users through a simple mobile app. This unique business model empowers even the unbanked population to trade in cryptos,” said Mohit Davar, co-founder of Huobi MENA. He further added, “We are very excited about this partnership and business model. We will be looking to replicate this with other partners in other countries also.”
Thaer M. Suleiman, CEO of CASHU, also commented on the new partnership. “We are excited about this partnership with Huobi to provide millions of users in the MENA region with the ability to trade cryptocurrencies the easiest way,” he said. “We hope this would be a start of a very fruitful opportunity to bring the experience of Cryptocurrency Trading to a very dynamic, young and exponentially growing region.”
CASHU is used as a payment method by nearly 2.3 million users and more than 75,000 vendors spread across the Middle East and North African regions as well as 7,000 online merchants and service providers globally.
CASHU is designed from the ground up to accommodate users without access to a bank account. Users can make payments in local fiat currencies with CASHU’s local merchants in order to add credits to their account balances. Using that same balance, the customers can buy cryptos instantly. In addition, customers who wants to physically own cryptos can register an account directly with Huobi and trade over 400+ cryptos.
CASHU charges users a modest and transparent 2% transaction fee for buying and selling cryptos with local currencies – a relative bargain in a region where local currency markups are commonly much higher.
“We’ve seen very strong interest in crypto across MENA but a constant pain point users face is how to access it when all that user has is local fiat currency,” said Davar. “This initiative is a big step towards fixing this problem.”
