Everything You Want To Know About COTI’s Adoption and Usage

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COTI

8 min readDec 11, 2019

For those new to the COTI community, and for those that want to learn more, we’ll be releasing a series of tech guides over the next week detailing the COTI tech and what powers the COTI network. In the article below you can learn more about COTI’s adoption and usage.

On February 2019, we published an article called COTI: The Path to Adoption. In this article, Shahaf Bar-Geffen, COTI CEO described the ‘Ten Commandments of Adoption’. Let’s dive into it one more time:

The Ten Commandments of Adoption

Do it right or don’t do it at all”

In defining the philosophy that marks the current incarnation of the COTI project, our team took into account the lessons of 2017/18 and the critical issues surrounding blockchain technology that have limited its ability, use and adoption in the real world. We have adopted this philosophy into our approach moving forward with COTI and summarised it into the ten commandments below.

1) Simplicity

Blockchain DApps need to be so simple that users could use apps without even knowing that they are using crypto.

Blockchain should be an underlying technology, not something that is the sole or main selling point. Do users care which cloud service their favorite apps run on? Of course not — if it runs well.

While the underlying technology that powers COTI is extremely complex, the user and merchant-facing tools developed have been designed with simplicity in mind.

2) Accessibility

Blockchain dApps need to be accessible to as many users as possible.

Utilising existing technology solutions and ecosystems that already have a foothold and user base is one of the most important aspects of bridging the gap between legacy and blockchain solutions. It is unrealistic to expect blockchain to completely replace legacy solutions in the short term. What is realistic is creating alternative solutions that provide a competitive advantage to legacy systems and allow them to operate side by side.

In a world in which over five billion people own a mobile phone, it is of critical importance that dApps are accessible from traditional app marketplaces, such as Apple’s App store and Google’s Play store.

The COTI Pay dApp will be available on the Apple App store, Google Play store and also as a web application.

COTI will also offer merchants access to a merchant dashboard that provides detailed data and reporting functionality on their COTI Pay transactions. Within this dashboard, merchants can choose which COTI Pay-supported currencies they wish to accept, as well as their preferred settlement currencies. The dashboard will also provide merchants with wallet-like functionality that enables them to make payments to COTI Pay wallet holders and to other COTI Pay-powered merchants, as well as the ability to use COTI-X’s facility to exchange currencies.

3) Usability

Crypto solutions need to be as user-friendly as existing legacy solutions. Users are unwilling to wait more than a few seconds for transactions to be confirmed and both users and merchants are unwilling to pay high fees for simple transactions.

Creating a crypto payment solution that utilises the advantages of blockchain technology while retaining the same level of usability and functionality of legacy payment solutions, without their obvious disadvantages, is key to actual adoption.

COTI offers a full POS (Point Of Sale) software suite that seamlessly integrates with COTI Pay. By utilizing the COTI POS, merchants will benefit from all COTI Pay advantages, while also being able to accept normal credit and debit card transactions. All that is required at the consumer and merchant end is access to the application on a mobile device to facilitate payments.

COTI Pay Business

4) Volatility

Volatility is one of the key weaknesses of cryptocurrency, especially in relation to payment solutions. Merchants will not accept a form of payment that may drop in value the next day, in the same way users are reluctant to pay with a currency that may appreciate in value the next day.

Providing stability, and in turn confidence, to both users and merchants is key to new payment methods being adopted by the masses. Integrating a stable coin into crypto payment networks is undeniably the best way to counter this volatility and reduce any such associated risks for all parties involved.

COTI has developed the COTI Dime, a generic price-stable coin pegged to USD 10 cents. The COTI Dime exists only within the COTI platform and serves as a price stabilization method ensuring usability for everyday and mainstream use by users and merchants.

5) Scalability

Once a user and transaction base has been established, scalability becomes a key element that effects crypto payment networks. Many crypto users will remember the issues Bitcoin had at the height of the crypto boom, with an average transaction cost peaking at $55 and many transactions taking hours or days to confirm.

Crypto networks must be designed with a scalability solution in place from the onset — not something that will potentially be added in or developed in time, as a network grows.

The COTI Trustchain is based on a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) infrastructure, a much more efficient and scalable blockchain solution than a traditional ledger. The Trustchain TestNet, with a limited amount of nodes, is currently running at 10K TPS and will scale past 100K TPS once in production. This means the COTI network will be able to support and sustain a transactionary level that surpasses legacy networks such as Visa and Mastercard… from day one.

6) Liquidity

Liquidity for legacy currency (fiat) is something we all take for granted. After all, liquidity is essentially secured by the government of the issuing currency.

In crypto, however, this is a different story, and many projects who have received significant amounts of funding have suffered from issues of liquidity, either from not being able to be listed on exchanges, or from a lack of consumer interest in their tokens.

COTI has created COTI-X, an internal interoperability exchange and settlement layer on the COTI platform, serving three main purposes, an enabler of cross-currency payments, direct transfer of one currency to another and importantly, an enabler of liquidity on the COTI platform, via the conversion of COTI coin to COTI Dime and other cryptocurrencies/fiat. COTI has dedicated a pool of 45% reserve tokens specifically for creating and supporting liquidity for the COTI coin and COTI Dime via COTI-X, without the need for external exchanges or liquidity providers.

7) Immutability

While blockchain can provide great security and transparency via the use of immutable ledgers, the lack of third parties in the transaction chain becomes an issue when a payment is completed but the service or product is not delivered by a merchant.

In order to replace legacy payment solutions, crypto solutions need to provide the same level of buyer-seller protections that users currently have in legacy payment systems. While transactions can still be written to the blockchain in an immutable fashion, there must be recourse for a user in the event of a failed deliverance of a service or product.

COTI has developed an Arbitration Service that offers dispute resolution through a decentralized collective of highly trusted network participants that allows for similar or surpassed levels of dispute resolution as offered on legacy payment solutions, such as PayPal, Mastercard or Visa.

8) Portability

One of the reasons there are so many different cryptocurrencies is that each currency serves a different purpose and has different features. There is no one size fits all cryptocurrency. In the crypto payment ecosystem, it makes no sense for a user or merchant to deal with multiple cryptocurrencies, as the overhead required to manage this outweighs the benefits of doing so. However, like state-sponsored fiat currencies or company issued reward points or gift cards, there is a specific demand for a bespoke solution that is indicative of a brand or particular ruleset.

As such, governments and enterprises need to have the ability to issue their own cryptocurrency or token, backed by their own branding, real-world assets or other on-chain collateral, defined by their own criteria or rulesets.

By creating the COTI platform, COTI gives enterprises and governments the ability to issue their own currency on top of our infrastructure, essentially white labeling our entire platform, enabling for extreme ease of deployment of a crypto-based solution without the necessary time, cost and expertise usually required. This enables our solution and the COTI network exposure to the billions of users who are catered to by enterprise and government.

9) Anonymity

As crypto matures and continues to mature, the support of regulatory authorities is key to both the acceptance and adoption of cryptocurrency as a payment method or value transmission. As such, despite the founding premise on which Bitcoin was founded, for widespread support and adoption, a cryptocurrency that will serve for mass payments can’t be anonymous.

In this sense, transactions themselves can still be private, however for full support or regulatory authorities, and in turn acceptance and adoption worldwide, users using crypto must follow industry standard KYC and AML processes to remain compliant with enterprise and government requirements.

Privacy is a cornerstone for COTI, meaning transactions cannot be tracked back to a specific user, as a multi-address is implemented for each transaction by a one-way hash function. Users and merchants must undergo a KYC and follow AML processes to be involved in the COTI ecosystem.

10) Transparency

Transparency is often used in reference to the blockchain itself, however, transparency regarding the operations of blockchain companies has been a constant conversation in the crypto community during the bear market, as runways and token prices for projects have collapsed. Due to the lack of oversight and regulation of companies in the crypto space, and with investors being sold utility tokens that represent no stake in the company itself, ICO’s have acted in a no rights and no responsibility manner towards token holders.

Crypto companies should have the same, or greater, level of transparency regarding their funding, operations and future plans as real-world businesses.

By moving to an equity-based funding model, COTI will open itself up to a level of transparency and responsibility to stakeholders that is representative of its status as not just a crypto project, but also of a real-world company.

The Path to Adoption

“Actions speak louder than words”

Mindful of the many broken promises of other ICOs, COTI has taken great strides to not only deliver upon its original commitments but to greatly surpass them, based off the current needs of both our project and the crypto market in general.

In keeping in line with these commitments, in the past months, we have —

Launched our MainNet with 10K TPS
Already generating revenue from real world clients, processing $5 million USD every month, as can be viewed on our block explorer (https://explorer.coti.io/). Credit Card processing would be live soon, and we’ll announce it very soon. We expect to process over 10MM USD / month in less than a quarter.
Launched the Universal Payment System is well underway with the Crypto processing elements in place for BTC and ADA, with more to follow soon.
COTI’s Crypto Gateway allows payments to be received by merchants in Bitcoin and ADA. Thanks to the Crypto Gateway, merchants will be able to accept ada payments easily and directly via their website. In order for you to be able to see the ada Payment Gateway in action, we’ve created a demo COTI store where you can purchase a personalised COTI image for $0.50c. Check it out here.

Pay with ada — powered by COTI