Those of you who are a part of the blockchain and crypto community are well aware of all the rhetoric and political conversations around blockchain technology. For the uninitiated: there is a significant portion of the community for whom the phrase “blockchain revolution” means something more dramatic and disruptive than an improvement to financial network security.

Regardless of politics, for anyone who understands the technology and sees its potential, there is a sense that blockchain tech is more than just an improvement to existing systems, that it has the potential to dramatically change the financial world and how we interact with it, and within it. While only time will tell exactly how and to what extent that becomes true, in the general sense at least it cannot be denied. To this point however, most products and services using blockchain tech have been geared either towards the crypto community or the financial community. This of course makes sense, since these are the two groups most aware of and comfortable with the technology, but at the end of the day, these two groups make up a rather small percentage of the general population and are themselves only a small percentage of the world’s industries and businesses. There is indeed a blockchain revolution happening, but the reality is that to this point it has been a rather limited and insular one.

A lot of very smart and driven engineers, mathematicians and business people have spent a lot of time nurturing, developing and growing the foundations of the blockchain world. The last couple of years have seen an explosion of new altcoins, DAOs, smart contract services, credit card integrations, cryptocurrency exchanges, banking support, mobile wallets, etc etc etc. There are hundreds of amazing companies and thousands of people who have devoted themselves to the creation of this amazing infrastructure. They have already started changing the world for the better and continue to build the framework that the ongoing blockchain revolution will be build on.

It’s these companies and individuals that have designed the smart contract technology we’re using to ensure safe and secure transactions, the cryptocurrencies that serve as our value transfer networks, and the exchanges and integration tools that let us fit seamlessly into the existing payment technologies.

Our goal, and the purpose of the Branche platform is to bring the blockchain revolution out of the corners of the internet and the board rooms of financial institutions, and put it in the convenience stores, the community centers, the coffee shops, and the back pockets of our fellow citizens.

Your quiet neighbor, your down-on-his-luck cousin, the stressed out single mom you see at the store, that computer illiterate relative we all have … these are the people we want to bring the revolution to. These people deserve to benefit from it just as much as we do.

We know we won’t reach everyone (no one can), but you have to start somewhere.

So we decided to start with those who could benefit most: the underbanked.

Statistically speaking, if you’re reading this, chances are you won’t need our services. You probably have a bank account and have had one for as long as you can remember. You probably have a credit card, and maybe even a mortgage.

But for a moment, imagine being that single mom at the store. Imagine that maybe she’s on social assistance. Imagine that her partner left her with two young children, and even with a full time job, the cost of child care is so high, that she’d actually have more money at the end of the month if she just stayed home with the kids and went on welfare. Now imagine that because she lives in a low income neighborhood, there aren’t any banks around her (we’re assuming she even has a bank account). To even go and get her assistance cheque cashed she needs to take a bus 20 minutes each way to go stand in line and be judged by the bank teller. Twenty minutes isn’t that bad … unless you have to wrangle a 3 year old and a baby into boots and jackets and corral them down to the bus stop and keep the little one from playing with some garbage and then get them on the bus and then the baby starts crying and you finally get to the bank but the 3 year old won’t stay still the baby’s restless, and you finally get your cheque cashed and turn the whole thing around and you usher the 3 year old back onto and then off the bus, your arm aching from carrying the baby and then more than 2 hours after you started getting the kids ready to go out, you are finally home and can feed the baby and pay the rent on time.

Now imagine that with Branche, a local Vendor could have met her in front of her apartment and that whole process could have taken 5 minutes and cost less than the bus fair.

THAT is the blockchain revolution.