Translated material
Cards for cryptocurrency
The Singapore startup decided to turn the banking system, letting the “Trojan horse” into it - cryptocurrency.
On June 24, Tenx conducted its ICO - something like a crowdfunding based on cryptocurrency. In seven minutes, the company gathered deposits from almost 4 thousand people , and taking into account the pre -sale, attracted a total of about 67 million US dollars.
The small Tenx team makes a platform with which you can store all the accumulations in the cryptocurrency in one place and quickly exchange it for ordinary money. Tenx also plans to issue bank cards so that bitcoins, ether and other so -called altcoins can be paid instantly in any stores.
Who are Tenx
TENX is a small company based in Singapore, the PayPal Finteh Startapov incubator and working with its legal support. Tenx employees organized an office from several tables on the ground floor of the house, where they themselves live to save on rent. Singapore was chosen as a place for the headquarters due to the liberal attitude of the authorities to technological startups in the field of Fintech and cryptocurrency in general.
The head of the company is Toby Hoenisch, an Austrian who graduated in 2011 by the Graz Technical University. In June, he told BitBiteSoin : he studied cryptography at the university, and first met Bitcoin in 2011, stumbled upon a description of the project on the Internet. Then he considered Bitcoin a toy, but changed his attitude when his exchange rate reached one dollar: after that, Toby began to mine it on his own laptop. Subsequently, living in Japan, he met enthusiasts of a bitcoin community.
He financed his last startup from Bitcoin savings, but he never took off. Around 2015, Hoynish with a partner Michael Sperm decided to deal with cryptocurrency payments.
As an adherent of high technology, Hoynish clearly does not like a clumsy banking system and with the help of Tenx he intends to change the situation. He believes that traditional banks give financial instruments only about two billion people, and bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are virtually available to any person on the planet.
In the world of technology, any new product becomes popular quickly - over three years. I studied some “analog” businesses: for example, in the field of delivery, companies need about 20 years to completely change their fleet.
But if you look at the banking sphere, there are simply old: they are truly proud (even sending press releases about this) that they still use programs of 40 years ago.
Toby Hoynish, CEO of Tenx
What kind of product is Tenx
The most visible and understandable Tenx product is ordinary debit bank cards. The idea is that these cards will not be stored on dollars or rubles, but a cryptocurrency, which at the time of payment in the store will instantly convert to fiducial , ordinary money (Fiat Money).
Tenx wants to use the existing banking system and the capabilities of Visa and MasterCard to simplify payments through cryptocurrencies. The financial corporations themselves will continue to receive their own commission for each payment, so they will win. However, the more owners of such cards will be, the more the usual money is replaced by cryptocurrency - that is, the outdated system will be undermined from the inside.
In the video below, the Tenx operating director Paul Kitti (Paul Kitti) pays in the Singapore McDonald's using the OneBit card. It was created in 2015 as part of the startup Hoynish, which appeared thanks to the Hakaton MasterCard.
Initially, OneBit supported only bitcoin and worked through NFC using MasterCard PayPass technology, but Tenx wants to greatly expand the list of cryptocurrencies. The list already includes Ethereum and Dash, but subsequently other popular currencies like Zcash and Litecoin will be added to them.
The main competitor Tenx is the Token Platform from Monolith Studio, which conducted its ICO in the spring and attracted $ 12.7 million. Monolith Studio makes a similar product and has already released at least 500 of its own plastic cards, but the service only works with Ethereum and ERC20 cryptocurrencies. At the same time, the company considers their competitors the British online banks Starling, Revolut and Monzo, whose business models are more likely to resemble Rocketbank and Tinkoff Bank than Tenx.
Tenx argues that they have already handed out their bank cards a thousand beta testers in Singapore and other countries, and they are fully functioning. Subsequently, the release of the physical card will cost $ 15, virtual - one and a half dollars, and their maintenance will cost $ 10 a year (or for free with a waste of more than $ 1,000 a year). Tenx will not take its own commission for payments and transfers.
Not all countries will be delivered to all countries: for example, there is no USA, Egypt, Belarus, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan on the list, but there is Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, Poland, Latvia and dozens of other countries.
Why cards if there are exchangers
Hoynish has the same OneBit for several years, but has not yet made bank cards with cryptocurrency in the account. The reason is that Bitcoin, already popular in 2015, has grown even more in a few years - and at the same time the commission and the time of operations in Bitcoin increased.
Now it takes about 10 minutes to confirm payment of payment on average, which does not allow you to pay bitcoin in stores in the way people are used to doing this using bank cards. Therefore, in most cases, cryptocurrencies are cashed through exchanges and exchangers before paying for offline services.
However, years after mass hysteria on bitcoin in the winter of 2013, there were a lot of other cryptocurrencies with a smaller commission and faster transactions. The idea of Tenx is to allow you to store and seamlessly change some cryptocurrencies to others as part of the Comit’s own platform, uniting different blockchains.
If necessary, paying a cryptocurrency through a plastic card it can be instantly changed to the local currency at the most favorable rate. In addition, the card holder will receive a reward of 0.1% of all of his transactions in the form of Tenx tokens.
They are going to launch Comit at the end of 2017, integrate Bitcoin and Ethereum into it by mid -2018, and establish the release of their own cards by 2019. By 2020, Tenx expects that they will receive a banking license for blockchain -based, and their tokens will be fully recognized as one of the states.
So far, Tenx has only OneBit cards issued by a partner bank, and a mobile android application , which is simultaneously a wallet for several cryptocurrencies at once. The IOS and web version in the company intend to launch the application until the end of the summer of 2017.
ICO, which lasted seven minutes
Until June 24, Tenx existed only with its own and investor money. The main investor of the company is the Chinese venture fund Fenbushi Capital, founded by three partners, one of which is Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. In April, Tenx announced the receipt of one million dollars of investment from Fenbushi Capital.
Buterin himself claimed that he personally did not invest in Tenx, the company only participates in the fund's money. The entrepreneur has a strict policy in association with crypto -struts: he prohibits publicly mentioning a connection with himself to those whom he advises privately. In the case of Tenx, his photo hangs on the page of the project team .
On June 24, Tenx conducted the ICO (Inital Coin Offering, to read in more detail ), that is, allowed all interested to buy their tokens (they are called PAY) and thus financed the project. Tokens can be considered as shares of a company that do not make it possible to influence its activities.
In the case of TENX, tokens buyers can count on two things: for the fact that the tokens along with the growth and success of the company will grow in price (as shares), and for the payment of a small percentage of the commission for all transactions in Tenx. After Tenx was recommended by the American business publication Inc., attention to its ICO became extremely high.
As a result, when the sale of tokens opened, the required amount - 100 thousand broadcasts - was scored in just seven minutes. In mid -July, on pre -sale, Tenx sold tokens for another 100 thousand broadcasts in just 36 hours.
ICO Tenx was one of the fastest in history: at the time of opening the sale of tokens, about 40 thousand people went to the site at the same time, and only 4 thousand of them managed to acquire future “shares”. Now the company employees are devoting all his free time to clarification of how to check whether the buyer of tokens received, but their trading on exchanges will begin no earlier than the fall of 2017.