Monetha is a new mobile payment processing company which is developing their project on the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts and a decentralized trust and reputation system, think along the lines of PayPal combined with TrustPilot to get an idea of what they are trying to build. They have an upcoming ICO set to go live on the 22nd August 2017 which has a Hard Cap of 95000 ETH and Max token supply of 402,400,000.
Monetha is aiming to offer a faster and cheaper payment gateway than alternative payment processors, their fees will be 1.5% of the transaction compared to 2-6% of other alternatives. Credit card companies and traditional banks can take days or even weeks to pay the merchant their money from transactions, with Monetha, they can get paid in around 2 minutes – of course this will depend on the Ethereum blockchain, which has been overloaded at times ( mainly due to ICOs ), something they aim to fix with Raiden which will allow up to a million transactions per second.
The Decentralized Trust and Reputation system (DTRS) is an important part of the project. This system has a built-in algorithm which analyzes users and merchants reputations and gives each one a trust rating, think of the Amazon rating system or Trustpilot where merchants are given ratings by their customers.
This system is constantly updated in real-time as reviews are added and also claims or disputes within the system. This can help with scams, charge-backs, faulty goods and so on – something which is greatly required in global eCommerce at the moment.
The information within the DTRS is written into the Ethereum blockchain so a permanent, immutable record is kept which can help other users to make informed purchasing and selling decisions.
Could Monetha become a dominant payment processor ? Will be consumers want to use Cryptocurrencies for the majority of their online purchases? Let’s take a closer look at Monetha and their upcoming ICO.
Whitepaper
Here is the Whitepaper for Monetha.
[pdf-embedder url=”https://blockonomi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Monetha_WP.pdf”]The Team
Monetha looks to have a solid team behind the company with co-founders Andrej Ruckij, Justas Pikelis and Laurynas Jokubaitis and Eric Duprat as Payments lead, who used to be an executive at PayPal and was General Manager of the mobile department.
Members of the Team:
- Andrej Ruckij – Co-Founder/Technology
- Eric Duprat – Payments lead
- Kellogg N. Fairbank – Sales and Merchant Acquisition Lead
- Dr. Jean-Marc Seigneur – Decentralised Trust and Reputation lead
- Justas Pikelis – Co-Founder/Business
- Laurynas Jokubaitis – Co-Founder/Product
- Viaceslavas Ruckis – Engineering lead
- Alex Bazhanau – Principal Ethereum Engineer
- Erikas Malisauskas – Product design/Front end developer
- Martynas Adomaitis – Smart Contract developer
- Andrej Davidovic – Software engineer
Advisors:
- Sean Harper – Product and Payments
- James Downton – Marketing advisor
- Nik Rokop – Business advisor
- Robertas Visinskis – ICO advisor
ICO Details
The crowd sale starts on the 31st August 2017 and ends 30th of September 2017 with a soft cap of €7 million and a Hard Cap: 95000 ETH. The Max token supply is 402,400,000. 60% of tokens will be sold during the crowd sale; 10% will go to advisors, bounties and campaign costs; 15% will go towards the loyalty program and 15% will be kept by the team and be vested for 12 months by smart contract.
After the crowd sale, the company plans to move to Singapore “which has a huge Ethereum community and extremely good business environment for fintech startups” and today the CEO outlined his plans for the company once the sale is over.
I like the fact that 10% of the token supply will be retained for the team but held in a smart contract for 12 months, giving them time and incentive to push the company along to increase the value of the token for themselves and other holders.
MVP
The team has already put together and Minimum Viable Product ( MVP ) together which you can try out, they have created a WordPress plugin and a Magento extension which you can download from their site and test out.
They have also created a simple “Buy Now” button which can be used on any web page. To get started, all you need to do is create an Ethereum wallet using MyEtherWallet and then contact them with your website details and ethereum address to get started,
Conclusion
While I don’t think the project itself is revolutionary, I do think the team behind it is solid and the industry they are entering is huge, some $3.6 trillion per year is processed by payments companies, if they could capture a small percentage of this it would make them very valuable.
Whether or not the public wants to use Cryptocurrencies for day to day purchases online remains to be seen, and they could be in a battle if one of the more established players such as PayPal enters this space. In their roadmap, they do outline that they will have an e-commerce solution that allows for fiat exchanges by 2018. They will also be competing against Omise Go, which is a large player in Asia with a big company behind it and also an established network of retailers to tap into.
Their offering does differentiate itself from other payment processors however, due to their Decentralized Trust and Reputation system which I think is a very welcome part of the project. The Ethereum blockchain is perfect for this sort of permanent record of trust and transactions so this could help them stand out more.
They have a long way to go before this project launches for retail which is pencilled in for 2019, so if you are considering entering this ICO I would consider it a long-term hold which could see great returns if the company goes anyway to capturing a part of this large and lucrative market.
