hello, world. this is midas.
Midas is a new investment experience, it is your portal to fund and asset management on the blockchain. The mobile app grants access to an interactive community experience that is built around lucid and swift investment functionalities. The platform connects retail investors and businesses with ERC20 compliant products. Midas implements the Melon protocol to offer decentralized, technology-regulated funds.
Features
- Users can create, manage and invest in funds
- Portfolios can entail traditional and crypto assets
- Social media functionality enables building a network and interacting with other users
- Users can invest together in communities based on democratic decision-making
- Businesses can offer products and services on the platform
- Chatbot assistance and wallet integration guarantees maximum user friendliness
Point of Departure
The world of traditional fund management is permeated by thresholds, flaws and opacities. Huge amounts of money and time, necessary to set up a hedge fund, constitute heavy entry barriers that restrict market access to a vast majority of people. Relying on long chains of human interactions in the process of booking, reconciling and settling trades, the market moreover is vulnerable for errors and frauds.
Welcome to 2017
The blockchain technology enhances security, speed and accessibility. Eradicating intermediaries, smart-contracts can largely automate some of the costly and time-consuming processes involved in running a fund. While the blockchain accelerates and facilitates investment structures, it provides a higher level of security by enforcing the funds’ rules and parameters autonomously. Thus, lowered market thresholds enable broad participation and improve competitiveness.
The King’s favorite Fruit?
Melons. As collection of open-source smart-contracts, based on Ethereum — with future perspective to be deployable on further blockchains — the Melon protocol provides the basis for fund management on the blockchain.
Midas is a mobile portal to the Melon protocol and delivers an appealing, swift and easy environment for digital fund management. The platform is based on three main elements:
1. Community
As recent years’ overwhelming success of social media networks has shown, people love to share, follow, participate — live, in real-time. Furthermore, massive user bases within Asian and African markets adopted in-app-purchases and created new digital consuming patterns. Simultaneously, community-based forms of value production like crowdfunding and ICOs have risen and are now challenging traditional financing structures.
Midas enables the world to participate in an open and diverse investment community. This community means connecting to a broad network; contributing to and benefiting from its hive-mind. It means observing other users’ investment performances and learn from their experiences.
A transparent, performance-based rating and comment system delivers clear overview who is successful and how, providing the basis for informed and clever investment decisions.
Propose your fund to other investors. Share projects you like with your network. Investors are never alone. Before taking an investment decision, ask your network. Once invested, invite others to come on board.
Community funds allow to setup funds and finance projects with your personal network. Invite your friends, family members, neighbors. Your best friend’s fund, a coffee shop around the corner or an ambitious environmental project. Decide together. Invest together.
2. Business
Despite the recent rise of crypto assets and token launches, the market is still a niche. Next logical step however is the tokenization of non-digital, traditional assets, thus trading of, and investment in stocks, real estate, gold, carbon credits, oil, in a digitalized form. Soon, everything will be tokenized, products, services, or even more simple: everything with value.
Besides crowdfunding of technology or development projects, existing businesses will have a great share in this development. Their customers will collect and invest in tokens for various reasons.
Midas connects businesses with customers. Advertisements, promoted content, participative models in product development and financing. Products and services can be integrated in the news stream of users, always with the possibility to invest.
3. Usability
The Midas Touch builds an interface between the news stream and investments. Every displayed content can entail an investment possibility. As easy and fast as clicking the Like button, users can invest in proposed funds, projects or promoted content. Sharing content, users can integrate the Midas Touch to enable other users to invest.
The baseline is maximum intuitiveness and user-friendliness through usage of already known mechanisms connected with new functionalities. In order to reach inclusiveness in the spheres of investing and finance, Midas provides an ultimately easy and swift environment.
Midi the chatbot is an integral part of this experience. Its initial task is to help users to set up the account and create a fund. Hereafter it guides through the platform. Dependent on the user’s needs, Midi helps to define suitable assets and design an entire investment strategy. Integrated in the search function, Midi is always available to support researches or answer market-related questions. With growing integration of market analysis tools and AI elements, the chatbot will become an important tool to make investment decisions.
Getting started and exploring the Midas market place only requires to sign up. To become fund manager and investor, users have to connect the preferred payment method, ranging from mobile and digital wallets to credit card or PayPal.
We care a lot #1
“It’s a dirty job, but someone gotta do it.” — Faith No More (Youtube)
Legal framework always takes time to adapt to new technologies, clearly visible in the current worldwide discussions about regulations in the crypto space. Hence, apart from technical development, the biggest challenge for Midas lies within legal realization. Here, we focus on two aspects at the moment:
1. KYC/AML
Even before the actual platform launch matching Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations is crucial for us. The Midas token generation event (TGE) will be characterized by industry-leading verification procedures in order to provide transparency and maximum investor protection. We expect this to be standard in the future.
Once the platform is running, people will have to go through a distinctive KYC process in order to sign up. However, prior to singing up users explore the Midas platform and take a glance at its functionalities. In order to actively participate, every user gets registered and every business or provider gets verified.
This procedure will also provide third parties like ICOs the possibility of linking to the Midas platform, thereby outsourcing the effort of thorough verification processes.
2. Licenses
Traditional fund management requires managers to hold a license to operate with other people’s money. Using smart contracts for fund management, this license (at least in its conventional way) becomes unnecessary since managers can only act within the predefined parameters of a smart contract. Any action that is not intended or may be harmful to investors is therefor prevented automatically. It is our task to make this clear to regulators.
Incorporating in the crypto valley in Switzerland and working with a leading lawyer team on preparing the legal terrains, we believe to be on the right track to tackle outmoded regulations.
Partnering with other players will provide more leverage to move regulators together and pave the way for up-to-date regulations. Switzerland, as one of the most progressive jurisdictions by the time writing, will be a good starting point to move cautiously, yet in a target-oriented way.
You will hear from us
We will keep you posted about our advancements. Technical questions can be addressed particularly on Gitter.
We decided against publishing a white paper — a concept that has been quite battered during the recent explosion of ICOs — and provide instead two main sources of comprising information; 1. Concept Paper; 2. Technical Paper (will be announced soon).
Follow us and stay tuned
