After last amazing couple of years Pungo is saying goodbye for good.
Blockchain is a fascinating technology, with many projects being build for all tastes. Some more focused on mainstream and some others building amazing decentralized techs that could potentially create new governance forms and independent economies. In my humble opinion the second is way more interesting than helping biggest tech/financial companies settle their accounts faster and more securely.
One may discuss that the impact on vastly improving record keeping, clearing and account control on biggest tech/fintech companies directly impacts a vast amount of population. In the short term, that’s true; in the mid & long term, it brings even more power over people to those giant corporations; so I guess it’s a matter of own tastes regarding how people really benefits from tech.
Regarding record tracking, the most simple blockchain use case, creating a unique hash from a data set and storing it in an immutable distributed database, 10 years after inventing it still has a lot of space for growth in its usage, for companies willing to proof the veracity of their processes.
Probably one of the first ones to come up with this enterprise focused product was Factom but many others have arised, including biggest accounting software products, who are starting to integrate this kind of solutions.
When it comes to talk about money, one of the first-thought use cases for cryptocurrencies (and my preferred one) was using it as money itself. Bitcoin has caused quite a big revolution and now DeFi (and stable coins at scale) are being marketed as the next big thing.
The key part of cryptocurrencies is being able to convert them into legally-backed money and, in my opinion, it’s the biggest obstacle towards allowing alternative monetary systems to arise and develop at scale.
This has a lot to do on how “power” works and has worked during centuries, where powerful minorities try to keep things under control as new things come to play. Whether we like it or not, political power and economic power have always been highly tied. When it comes to see decentralized systems grow at scale, this creates a hard friction point that we have usually seen in the news the lasts years.
Regarding Pungo, personal energy is very important when building a project and Covid has unfortunately caused many unexpected changes in the world that suggest that the most wise approach in our case is to stop here.
There are a lot of lessons learnt and probably would be too long to expose them; the most important one is that keeping balance between personal life and your “killer” project is very important as well as choosing the right team, travel partners and advisors. It has been a great experience to be around and will definitely continue to stay connected to the ecosystem and open to comments, suggestions and ready to share any of the work we have been doing. So don’t hesitate to contact in case you have questions.
As to the software we have built so far, we are open to give access to code base and help it setup to anyone that wishes to take a look at it or revamp for other usages. In a nutshell, the features of the production tested backend API:
- Orders: Pricing engine that can create Buy/Sell orders (in any currency or crypto)
- Swaps: Automatic P2P Swap orders engine (crypto to crypto)
- Users: User creation & verification flow (passwordless) with free Tier config
- Fees: Ability to set up fees and forward them to a given address on each order
- Order handling: Order statuses automation; automatically triggered or user/operator triggered depending on rules.
- Order access & notifications: SMS & Mail notifications on order changes with 1 click links to access order handling page (web)
- Crypto: Backend supports receiving and handling ETH, ERC20, KMD and compatible chains and many other chains such as Smart, Digibyte, Litecoin, Zcash among others. Support for new chains is easy to add
Frontend side we have created and maintained:
- Operation dashboard, with permissioned roles to handle orders
- Pungo wallet (Android, Web & iOS) supporting dozens of cryptocurrencies, which we have white labelled for several small projects
- Chatbot UI supporting order creation and exploring use cases like sending money abroad using our API
Regarding documentation, API usage is documented on Apiary and can be opened to anyone looking to take a look, being mostly up to date. On the other hands our servers are going offline, so in order to test you will need some support to set up the different services and probably to spend some devops hours (yours or ours) on the setup.
In case you want to contact us, drop us a line through https://pungo.io or via telegram at @pungoio
So that’s all folks! It has been a great pleasure to be around, let me close this post by saying something that usually drives my motivation through life.
Empowering people to think, learn, participate, build, cooperate & share is probably the only tools we have to fight inequality, fascism, authoritarianism and abuse. Those who know about history, are quite aware that this battle has never been won by humankind, yet fighting it in our own ways is probably worth it :)
