A new ‘bitcoin’ for social media but will YouTube, Facebook and Instagram users buy?

Entrepreneur Andy Tian is hopeful that gifto, his soon-to-be released digital currency will become the bitcoin for the masses, a cryptocurrency which could be popularised and used by the billions of users on some of the biggest social media such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

“Up until now, cryptocurrency and the technologies behind it are mostly used in the crypto community. We want to help digital currency and its related technologies crack into the mainstream by allowing a large number of real users to not only spend the currency, but to use it with fun,” said Tian, co-founder and chief executive officer of Asia Innovations Group, which runs the popular livestreaming app UpLive with a global user base of about 20 million.

With its first ever token sales event scheduled for November, the company is building a blockchain technology-enabled “universal gifting platform” that will allow global users on social media platforms, such as those on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to send virtual gifts to content creators they like without locking into any particular platform. These gifts can be redeemed into gifto.

Gifto would have real value equivalent, and be convertible to ethereum or bitcoin, which smashed through the US$5,000 level to an all-time high last week, Tian told the South China Morning Post in an interview ahead of the token sales. He did not disclose the size of the offering.

Rather than relying on digital coin to raise capital, the exercise also known as initial coin offering, which crypto information provider CoinDesk said over US$2 billion had been raised globally, Tian wants gifto to be a “world changing product” to help social media content creators make money from their followers even when they do not speak the same language or use the same currency. The international transfer of cryptocurrency is free of charge and fast.