C Is for Cryptocurrency: Here’s How to Make Blockchain Child’s Play

Can you explain blockchain to a five-year-old? It can be hard to do in this techno-jargon-heavy sector. However, that’s not stopping a handful of entrepreneurs focused on teaching younger children about “money and the future of finance through play,” as Filipo Yacob, founder and CEO of Pigzbe, puts it.

Yacob knows the territory. He is the inventor of Cubetto, an educational toy that teaches children as young as three the basics of coding. It has been sold in more than 100 countries. Now he’s focused on Pigzbe, a combination game and hardware wallet he calls “a 21st century digital piggy bank that runs on our own cryptocurrency, wollo.”

For young children, Pigzbe’s hardware wallet acts as a controller for a game in which they earn wollo for learning about finance. And parents can use that wallet as a portal for paying that all-important allowance, or even gifts, in cryptocurrency.

Toys and books are making cryptocurrencies a more familiar concept to children and their parents.

“One of our main aims is to help children become financially literate,” Yacob tells ThirtyK. “Traditional piggy banks only teach about saving and spending…. By tokenizing the piggy bank, we can now teach about exchanging and physical modeling as well.”

Disruption Made Elementary

Yacob says the traditional allowances parents pay children are due for disruption. “Young children learn best through rapid rewards,” he says, but parents often lack physical pocket change to pay them in the moments after they complete a task. Some traditional banks have created their own digital piggy banks, but they may charge transfer fees or create other barriers to microfinancing tasks such as taking out the trash or that one-off gift from Grandma.

Pigzbe’s hardware wallet and cryptocurrency addresses these issues, doubling as a secure cold storage wallet that kids can continue to use even after they outgrow the game, according to Yacob.

And the idea of facilitating borderless transactions with the wollo cryptocurrency reflects another, potentially much larger, disruption for the growing number of families scattered across the world. With international remittance fees averaging more than 7 percent, borderless transactions could have a huge impact on the $575 billion remittance market, Yacob says, noting that wollo’s presence on the Stellar network is “ideally suited to enabling globalized families as micro-financing networks, sending small sums of money regularly.”

Pizgbe has surpassed its soft cap of $2.85 million in private presales and has a public ICO scheduled for July; Yacob says the platform and wallet are scheduled for delivery in 2019.