“United we stand strong.” Among many things, this is the motto of Bulgaria — the country, where Jarvis was born. It’s also what Jarvis stands for — making FinTech and blockchain stronger, through uniting its many components and features in a seamless ecosystem. This may feel like a lot of cliché’s all at once but it’s actually a very productive and, we believe, effective strategy in FinTech — here’s why.
Unification is incredible — banks have always revolved around networking, working closely together and lobbying governments and markets. If we, the FinTech and blockchain agnostics, really want to offer an alternative, we, too will need to work together. The end goal should be for someone who has never worked a blockchain wallet, like your grandma, to be able to go on Jarvis and not have to ask “What’s Bitcoin?”.
Why is this important? Because banks have a monopoly on our financial lives, data and services. We pay large, everyday taxes for services, which could be removed, because we don’t have an alternative. However, with the blockchain toolbox, the FinTech industry could break this monopoly and offer better, cheaper, easier solutions. Not only can this make life easier for us all, it can also democratise centuries old cliques of elite financial professionals, allowing everyday Joe’s to enter the world of trading and investment.
How?
So far, blockchain has changed how we make, manage, and invest our money. You can trade, mine, rent your space, get paid to listen to radio etc. — economically, politically and socially blockchain is way more than just Bitcoins. When it comes to finance, blockchain is enabling amazing new revenue streams, such as mining, asset tokenization, sharing resources and much more. You can make money by watching adds or by simply leaving your laptop on at night.
It’s also changing the way we invest through tokenization and the digitalisation of assets (i.e. uploading and selling your apartment on a blockchain). By combining traditional and novel investment schemes, blockchain is allowing everyone to invest in everything — as little as $0.01 can be invested in a new enterprise (ICO), an existing corporation’s stocks, real estate, art etc. To many, especially younger investors, this may seem mundane but the ability to invest in this fashion is utterly game-changing. What’s more, asset tokenization is taking this to a whole new level — you’re recently graduated and your parents always told you that the best investment is real estate. However, you see these people making millions from ICO investments and your fingers are itching to try it out. Why not do both? Even you have $50 saved up, you can absolutely split them and buy a small fraction of a house and a few tokens of an ICO! That’s an incredible new type of investing, which is allowing people of all backgrounds, all over the world to join in and break the ‘old boys’ club’!
Moreover, blockchain and FinTech are changing how we manage our money. We have wallets, we keep huge amounts of funds at almost no costs, we have instantaneous connectivity, exchange and trade, we’re able to loan, buy and exchange across the world, we work on weekends (!), most of all — we’re able to have honest and transparent financial services.
Where does Jarvis fit in?
All these features are not dreams — they exist and the brightest minds of the world are working on their development and perfection. With new legislation like PSD2, we’re now entering a world, where FinTech is becoming a new norm, rather than an outlier — this is our cue to move forth with the best tech and blockchain projects. Think of how quickly we have come to embrace online banking and contactless card payments — soon, it would be normal to hold your assets in online wallets.
The biggest issue is that the world of blockchain and is absolutely not user friendly. With the arrival of PSD2 we will see more and more such companies developing good solutions for several reasons. Without going into mad detail here, PSD2 will turn what was nearly impossible before an easy and cheap everyday feat. By making things easier for entrepreneurs and developers, PSD 2 will help develop new financial services, based both on traditional and blockchain banking. This rise of competition will naturally birth amazing new features, which could empower traditional banking. We’re already seeing apps that let you manage many bank accounts at one, from different banks. We have super cheap and easy solutions for money transferring, managing and sending. However, they’re just scraping the surface — these new solutions are cosmetic changes to the established order. While FinTech makes things easier (and prettier), until now it has been unable to change the actual processes of banking — imagine a product that changes its packaging but stays the same. With blockchain, FinTech companies now have the ability to change the actual financial network we have inhabited until now. Ripple, for example is enabling cheaper, faster new transactions. Golem is letting users make money by sharing their computer space. ETHLend is offering almost instantaneous loans by allowing you to collateralise your crypto.
When we want to compete with the banking systems, however, we need to remember, the industry combines lobby, connections and money. In order to be a viable alternative to banks, we need to aggregate, just like they do — by creating ecosystems, we’re offering an entire marketplace, where your products can have meaning and everyday use. Nobody will use your incredible crypto loyalty card scheme, or your lending app, if there is no cheap and easy exchange to let them buy things with these points in ‘real world’ shops and cafes. We’re offering users a new way to do a core daily activity — you wouldn’t place your money across 33 apps. To really make FinTech and blockchain products usable, we need to be working together. We need a platform, where a user enters and has access to as many products and solutions as possible.
By creating unified solutions, Jarvis can really offer the best of blockchain’s potential in just a few clicks, bringing what are considered futuristic solutions, to the masses. Let’s try and envision what such a unified ecosystem would give us. Within Jarvis’s ecosystem, you can trade in the morning and then lend your profits for a bigger turnover in the evening — by unifying many solutions and partner apps, Jarvis can offer a single wallet to serve all your needs. Jarvis’s exchange functions at a fraction of any other exchange’s price, you can trade any token for fiat or other crypto’s, with a single click. But we don’t plan to do it on our own — we’re just creating the basis, where you can plug your app or product. We believe through interoperability, we can build an infrastructure, where synergies are created naturally between apps.
By integrating apps as one-click tools, Jarvis can offer the type of user experience, which will bring FinTech to mass adoption. The end user doesn’t even need to know there is blockchain on it — it’s just meant to bе super easy and convenient. If you leave your laptop on at night for Golem, making their coin overnight and then want to reinvest that money in a new coin, you can — you don’t need to know that behind the scenes Jarvis is adopting state-of the-art tech and UX to make the experience seamless — all you care about is that you’re making money safely, easily, and having fun!
Today all our best and brightest minds are making innovative projects and apps a reality. But their work often goes unnoticed and is soon abandoned, because users’ attention is consumed by the giant aggregators (Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.). To have framework where solutions are interconnected, will give concrete use cases and real life application to many products, which are unusable today. Imagine how a solution like Golem could benefit from such interoperability, where a user can earn money from renting their computer and then invest the earnings in an ICO or even withdraw them in a single click. A unified and seamless space will give developers the ability to work together and create something truly amazing. Such a space would give the community a much needed head start, to launch FinTech into the mainstream. With policies, such as PSD2, we also have the legal pathway to make it happen.
Unification isn’t just about unifying blockchain — we need to bridge the traditional world with the crypto world. We can unify the financial market, stock market, forex trading, real estate investment etc. but to make it really usable, the blockchain community needs to work with other software — Slack, Twitch, etc. Why recreate everything? If user likes Slack, Twitch, Steemit, let’s integrate them to increase community. On Jarvis, for example, you’ll have a Twitch button on your apps to live stream your trading or your analysis. This way, you can have one wallet to unify all your needs and spendings, as well as your social or media market.
