What the world is saying

Two weeks ago we announced some pretty big news. In the near future, Abra users will be able to gain investment exposure to popular stocks and ETFs.

This functionality will be available in 155 countries (meaning people living in places with complex investing infrastructure will have the ability to buy fractional amounts of global brands listed on US stock exchanges).

With only a $5 minimum, the goal for this new kind of investing tool is to level the financial playing field and allow everyone the opportunity to start investing in some of the world’s most valuable assets.

Check out the early access opportunity: Existing and new Abra users will get $0 fees on stock and ETF investing through 2019 just by signing up for the waitlist.

These new investment opportunities will be global and accessible because of Bitcoin. On the backend, Abra will make use of Bitcoin’s programmable nature to enable smart contracts that give users investment exposure to all kinds of assets — in the same way that Abra currently uses the Bitcoin blockchain to gain exposure to synthetic crypto and fiat assets.

But, enough of what we say about it. Instead, check out what others are saying about. These are just a few selected recent media stories.

• CoinDesk: Abra’s blockchain app to let users invest in fractions of stocks, ETFs. “For the initial roll-out, Abra said it will offer 50 new investment assets, including stocks from major firms like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix; commodities like SPDR Gold Trust; ETFs like Vanguard Growth and the S&P 500; and indexes like the Russell 2000.”

• Cheddar: How Abra’s CEO plans to make the WhatsApp for money. “‘Consumers in Mexico, India, China, Southeast Asia [and] parts of Europe are completely shut out of Western investing,’ Barhydt said. ‘There are 100,000 investment accounts in all of Mexico for tens of millions of people. This makes no sense. Our mission is to democratize financial services and we’ve figured out how to do that using this cool crypto blockchain based technology … it works in 155 countries because we don’t have to be some SEC-brokered dealer because of the way this technology works.’”

• Forbes: Abra app unveils Apple stock exposure pegged to Bitcoin. “Abra’s new products are therefore not tokenized stocks. ‘These aren’t ERC-style ethereum tokens,’ Barhydt noted. ‘There’s no tokenization going on here,’ he added. Barhydt posited Abra gives customers investment exposure to virtually any type of asset, without directly owning the underlying asset as the customer. Abra’s app essentially builds synthetic financial instruments utilizing the mentioned crypto-collateralized contract concept, resulting in customers seeing the same profits or losses as the actual asset itself.”

• The Block: Abra launches new stock trading service that turns $BTC into $FB. “‘We’re enabling something like stock investing,’ Abra CEO Bill Barhydt said in an interview with The Block. To start, it will offer exposure to 50 assets including Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. Instead of purchasing actual stock in a company, Abra’s platform allows users to buy a bitcoin representation of a stock. Here’s an example. Let’s say a user wants to buy a share of Apple stock through the Abra platform. That user would fund her account with the necessary cash to buy Apple for its current price. Immediately, Abra’s so-called C3 system converts that cash to bitcoin. Then, Abra — using the magical power of smart contracts — keeps that bitcoin’s notional value tied to the price of Apple’s stock.

• BreakerMag: Crypto investing app Abra lets the world buy stocks (Bitcoin is collateral). To Barhydt, moving into mainstream financial assets makes perfect sense, even for a bitcoin bull. ‘The crypto maximalist pitch to the public is that you should have five percent of your net worth in [digital] assets, because the upside is huge,’ he says. ‘Okay, but what about the people in these other countries who are buying crypto, but don’t have access to this other stuff where they should be putting 95 percent of their money?’

You can join this unfolding story by signing up for the early access list and be one of the first to know when the new stock and ETF investing is available. More details are at abra.com/eq.