Hoard — a multi-crypto wallet, a DEX and a fiat gateway — friendly to new users
Mass adoption of cryptocurrencies depends upon the accessibility of the products in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In other words, the easier the products are to use and the more intuitively they fit to the environment the users live in, the more likely they and in turn cryptocurrencies are to gain mass adoption.
The users need an easy to use application that delivers on their expectations and interacts the way they do with services they commonly use.
“When my grandmother can use a wallet to send cryptocurrency, it will surely go to the mainstream.” This is a commonly used phrase among the general public, when asked about whether they see cryptocurrency taking off and becoming a realistic alternative to banks and credit cards. This claim does hold some air, because the laggards often are the ones that keep old systems alive and breathing while the early adopters would adopt any new system early. What determines the success of a trend is how the mainstream accepts it, and a user interface designed to fit the mainstream needs is paramount in this perspective.
In the traditional financial markets, there are apps such as Venmo and Paypal, which provide the users with relative ease of use and intuitive functionality. The mainstream user trusts the legacy platforms because they are relatively trustworthy to keep a certain amount of money in, they interconnect with legacy payment infrastructure, and they contain the most common services the mainstream audiences use, namely payments and payment requests, address books and splitting fees among other useful functions. These platforms are intended for daily use, so the amount of funds stored and used on them is limited to amounts typically used in retail purchases. For larger amounts, the mainstream still favours the banking system.
Cryptocurrency wallets today range from single-currency wallets to multi-currency wallets, eartly Bitcoin wallets being the most common among users. There are few if any surveys of which wallets are the most popular, but Bitcoin remains the most common investment for users who have just entered the market. Adoption of other cryptocurrencies apart from Bitcoin remains slow, partly due to lack of intuitive multi-cryptocurrency wallets that would provide other functions apart from simply holding the assets.
Multi-cryptocurrency wallets today are mostly intended for technical users. The main contenders mainly support a selection of cryptocurrencies and ERC-20 tokens, and their functionality is limited to sending and receiving the assets. Some wallets partner with an external service for brokering conversions between the assets, as well. This may feel limiting from the perspective of a mainstream user, who is used to services that support an address book, notes, payments and services such as payment requests.
Hoard is developing a platform to engage the mainstream user with products suited for users in the retail economy. The average user benefits from an interface and services that better reflect their needs, and this is what Hoard intends to address.
The wallet is an intuitive interface to the Hoard ecosystem. From the user’s perspective the wallet has everything a mainstream user would need in their everyday applications: An address book, access to social media platforms, payments and receivables, and a portfolio manager.
The wallet caters for cryptocurrency users as well. The portfolio is anonymous, which means that Hoard itself doesn’t report to government authorities, other financial institutions or anyone in particular about the user or how the funds are used without due permission by the user. The user is responsible for that themselves, and this is made possible through linkages to mainstream financial institutions. The keyword here is optional — the user may choose to link their account with service providers of their choice. The wallet supports cash and credit as well, which is something that other wallet providers haven’t yet done. Technically this would mean that Hoard is seamlessly linked to mainstream fiat economy, and becomes useful in this respect in the mainstream retail market. Indeed, the wallet service includes merchant and POS integration as a service. Through cryptocurrencies, larger purchases are also possible. The merchant will simply provide the customer additional documentation to fill, should they be required to do that by the relevant local authorities in order to process the transaction. The wallet supports automated investing as well, which probably increases adoption rates. Proven investment strategies help new cryptocurrency investors to gain trust in this new asset class. The platform also runs a decentralized exchange, which functions without the users’ private keys. The exchange is intended to come with simplified tools for new users and advanced interface for professionals. As a service, it is intended to simplify trading and improve accessibility overall.
Hoard services run on a decentralized platform, powered by the native OAR token. The token runs on Hoard’s native Smaug protocol, which technically can be best described as an inter-chain swap mechanism that relies on oracles to report activity on the connected blockchains, smart contracts to interact with Hoard products and masternodes for scalability. Consensus mechanism is based on voting by node owners. This incentivizes the masternodes to validate honest transactions. The oracles assist in cross-chain balance verification and in validation of fiat account balances. The masternodes will adopt on-chain verification in increments, as the smart contract platforms enabling verification services come to maturity. The heterogenous ecosystem of possibly connected platforms is probably the reason why masternodes in the Smaug protocol support off-chain verification in the first place. This makes sense also in designing the voting mechanism to depend on non-masternode nodes.
The OAR token incentivizes holders by allowing staking in exchange for off-chain transactions. The more the user hoards OAR, the greater their capability to transact instantly on the platform becomes, incentivizing active users to hoard more.
The project is intended to be funded through a private sale, followed with a public sale. The project admins have announced that while initially being based in the United States, the project is currently in the process of moving offshore due to current SEC regulations that make it practically impossible for U.S. -citizens to participate in cryptocurrency crowdsales.
My thoughts:
The project has been developed with deep knowledge about both cryptocurrency ecosystem, and with aid of comprehensive market research. The development plan for the wallet is well laid-out with the accessible user interface being the most important part, and the ease of use with legacy financial institutions and an integrated decentralized exchange turning the platform into a possible replacement for legacy fintech applications altogether. The technology behind the protocol is current, and based on the latest proven development in the cryptocurrency community at large.
Overall, I think that Hoard is a very mature project, and it could become a success, assuming that they find a favourable jurisdiction to operate from. I’ll keep my thumbs up for that.
Website: https://www.hoardinvest.com/
Whitepaper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.hoardinvest.com/public/docs/Hoard+Whitepaper+Draft+v1.3.pdf
This article was created in exchange for a potential token reward through Bounty0x
My Bounty0x username is starwalkerz