Kasta: Redefining digital payments
A new potential crypto gem? Kasta aims for instant and free crypto transactions, yield staking, easy swaps, launch of their own debit cards and more…
Kasta is a new project, still in deep development, which took it upon itself to massively popularize the use of cryptocurrencies for everyday payments in order to achieve mass adoption. As they state clearly:
Our mission is to steer the world towards worldwide cryptocurrency adoption and a crypto-based economy.
The four co-founders of the project — Carl Roegind, Carl Runefelt (known as The Moon on Twitter), Sebastian Appelberg and Hans-H Lusmägi — identified several problems with fiat payments as well as challenges concerning the current state of crypto payments. For crypto to achieve mass adoption, there would have to be a solution to those problems, or at least a better alternative to currently available services. Kasta’s goal is to be that solution.
First of all, what problems?
When it comes to fiat payments, they are incredibly slow compared to crypto transactions. Often times it can take until the next day for your money to be transferred. Additionally, cross-border transactions in fiat are usually very expensive — financial institutions charge very high fees.
Cryptocurrency transactions may seemingly solve those problems, but in doing so, they introduce a set of new ones. In most places, it is still difficult to use crypto payments for everyday purchases because not every vendor supports crypto payments. Sending crypto transactions and operating wallets can also seem very intimidating for majority of newcomers which renders this solution unavailable (or unfit) for most people.
Kasta argues that for crypto to reach global adoption, it must first be widely used as a medium of exchange, which is currently not the case. Most people nowadays view cryptocurrencies rather as a store of value (e.g. BTC).
What does Kasta bring to the table?
One could compare Kasta to PayPal or Venmo with the addition of crypto and blockchain features and benefits (blockchain security, quick transactions…).
Now, what is a rarity, even among crypto and DeFi (decentralized finance) projects, is that Kasta wants to make the transactions not only instant but also completely free (feeless). The project is able to achieve this by using Kasta’s hybrid decentralized/centralized approach (Which some could argue destroys the whole point of cryptocurrencies — that is, to be decentralized. But perhaps a small trade-off is worth it, given the benefits and positive consequences?).
Additional one-up on traditional bank accounts is Kasta’s high focus on yield farming. This would be a default option available for all Kasta users, even though you could get higher yield rates and lower fees by e.g. holding bigger amounts of KASTA tokens. However, a feature, also completely unique to Kasta, the option to create your own farming pools with your friends or social media audience, would allow you to reach higher yield rates even without holding huge amounts of tokens.
Next high priority area is UX (as well as UI). The goal here is to make the final product as user friendly and as simple to use as possible, so that people who are new to cryptocurrencies aren’t discouraged by complicated procedures, public addresses, private keys, different blockchain networks etc. As Carl Roegind stated in one of his interviews: “We want your grandma to be able to use our products” (paraphrasing).
Last but not least, Kasta plans to issue their own debit cards so that the users would have the ability to pay directly with crypto anywhere in the real world.
The Kasta team believes that those and additional features (Buy now, pay later; Request payment…) will not only create a solid technological product, but also will be enough to popularize crypto to the point of mass adoption, which is the ultimate goal.
The picture below provides a comparison with other, similar services:
As you can see, Kasta looks pretty promising.
Great! When?
Right now, Kasta is in the middle of development and 2022 looks pretty exciting for the project so far. In Q4 of 2021 the team managed to add several features and launch Beta.
Yesterday, on January 5, 2022, IEO (initial exchange offering) was held on Bybit with 25 000 000 KASTA tokens for sale.
The ultimate goal for Q1 of 2022 is to launch an MVP (minimal viable product). Then, throughout the year, more of the promised features will be added and the application itself will be polished to the desired state.
If you are interested in additional information (for the sake of simplicity of the article, I didn’t cover everything), I highly recommend reading Kasta’s whitepaper or checking out their website.
Thank you for reading.
