Our name "來來 Rai Lai" comes from the fact that the system of Rai, the stone currency of Yap, is similar to that of Bitcoin.
The stone money, rai, is so heavy that it is difficult to carry, so it is placed all over the island. Some rai are at the bottom of the sea, and no one knows where they actually are. Every time a rai is used for a transaction, the people of Yap are notified of "who has changed ownership of which rai," so everyone knows "who each rai belongs to." Because everyone knows the owner of each rai, one villager could not say, "This rai is mine," and use someone else's rai without permission.
In Bitcoin's blockchain, the amount of Bitcoin stored in each wallet is made public on the Internet, so it can be said that "everyone knows who has how much Bitcoin," which is similar to the Bitcoin system.
Furthermore, making rai was extremely hard work. The stones used to make rai could not be found on Yap, and had to be brought in from the Palau Islands, 450km away. The people of Yap would travel to Palau in a fleet of canoes, spend months quarrying the stone money, and bring it back on rafts. Unlike today, canoe voyages were dangerous, and some people probably died. People remembered the "legends" behind each rai, about the hard work and risk that went into bringing it there, and it seems that these "legends" determined the value of the rai. It could be said that rai was valuable precisely because it was so difficult to make.
It's similar to how we invest in ASIC miners, set up the ASIC miners somewhere far away from your home, run the ASIC miners on electricity, and have them perform a large number of calculations before we can finally mine Bitcoin.
If you mine Bitcoin, you will receive Bitcoin money, which is similar to mining stones, making Rai and bringing them to Yap Island. Furthermore, since the Chinese charactor "來" is pronounced similar to "rai" in Japanese, the name "Rai Lai" was born. 來來 Rai Lai is a platform that allows you to experience money (Rai) coming to you (Lai, meaning "come" in Chinese) by Bitcoin mining.
As you can see, rai has some similarities to Bitcoin, but that's not the only reason we're so interested in rai.
It is said that Yap's society was not originally run by "money" as we use it today, but was a typical "symbiotic society" where people supported each other. "In that kind of society, the bonds between people were more important than anything else, and stone money was one of the tools to create those bonds ." Even today, rai is still used as a kind of gift on ceremonial occasions.
We launched 來來 Rai Lai because we believe that just as Rai was a tool that connected people, Bitcoin can become a tool that connects people from different countries.
