AMA II with Martin Dyring-Andersen, CEO of e-Money (Part II)
Now, the conclusion of our AMA with Nhóm VBC, as Martin takes questions directly from the community.
Q: Are your stablecoins better than USDT and BUSD?
Martin: Yes, we are audited (transparent) and building on technology that is useful for real payments. We can support all major currencies.
Q: How do you plan to integrate people who do not handle crypto currencies into the use of e-Money? Do you plan to open an academy or a guide for the use of this platform?
Martin: We’ll start with adoption in the crypto space but plan to expand to retail payments over time. A good way to do this would be to provide simple to use and cheap mobile payment solutions, we are working with a partner on this.
Q: Yield farming is a new trending topic so do you have any plan to yield farming system development?
Martin: We won’t build tech to support this specifically, but our tokens can be used in DeFi applications without our involvement.
Q: Most investors just focus on the price of a token in the short term instead of the real value of the project. Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for investors in the longer term?
Martin: People should buy NGM if they believe we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg in regards to stablecoin adoption. The technology is just starting to mature to a point where it can be used in the real world, as mentioned: instant finality and scalability are key to real world payments.
Q: Today in every sector our slogan is “PRIVACY IS OUR RIGHT”. How would your project offer a Blockchain Privacy Protection for users?
Martin: We don’t have a privacy layer, but I see other projects trying to solve this. Our stablecoins should be usable there.
Q: In the future, will the NGM token be developed with more utilities? What is your plan to add value to NGM?
Martin: I believe 3 rewards outlined above brings significant value both short and long term
Q: What are the main difficulties encountered when starting this NGM project? And what is the motivation for continuing this project?
Martin: Regulatory and banking relationships. The motivation is that I see great benefit in offering a global audience easy and cheap access to something similar to a “multi-currency savings account” that can be used for efficient payments.
Q: From the ecosystem I saw I could contribute as VERIFIER or DELEGATOR, can you explain more about these 2 roles in the ecosystem.
Martin: Please see this doc: https://hub.cosmos.network/master/validators/validator-faq.html#how-to-become-a-validator
Our mainnet is based on Cosmos tech stack.
Q: Currently, Asian attaches great importance to Blockchain technology, is this a great opportunity for NGM? How is the NGM project planned to develop in Asian?
Martin: We plan to support JPY in the short term, longer term more local currencies as well. Happy to talk with partners who can provide a local presence.
Q: Trust is very important in business. So, what makes investors, customers and users feel safe when working with your project? And how will you get the trust of many users that have negative thoughts about Blockchain and DeFi?
Martin: I believe our track record so far speaks for itself. We self-funded in 2017 and have been working tirelessly since then off of those funds. We’re not raising crazy amounts of money, but taking a more measured approach where we don’t sell more than we need. I’d also recommend taking a look at our timeline to understand the progress made so far: https://e-money.com/timeline/
Q: For a project development first of all main priority is having enough funds. Is your team financially capable of running this project? Do you have enough fund for its developement? Can you tell us how your project generates the profit?
Martin: We’re wrapping up our private sale which is 7–8x oversubscribed. We’ve raised sufficient funds to scale our team and operate for the foreseeable future. The company makes money as it receives staking rewards (similar to other NGM token holders) and can sell these in the market. The buyback of NGM tokens against the stablecoin inflation helps support the NGM price. (see https://e-money.com/documents/e-Money%20Token%20Rewards.pdf)
Q: Where did you get the inspiration for this unique project idea? And what influence will we have on the crypto industry due to the project?
Martin: Stablecoins are not unique, but I believe our approach coming from Europe (and a negative/zero interest environment) has led to some design decisions that are much more sustainable. Imagine those 15 billion USD backing the Tether suddenly being affected by negative interest. It will be hard to maintain a 1:1 peg (if it exists today).
Q: Do your stablecoins follow any government regulations?
Martin: The stablecoins themselves are not under the supervision of the Financial Services Authority. See https://e-money.com/faq/do-you-have-an-eu-e-money-license/
Since we are conducting exchange between fiat and crypto we are registered with the FSA for this activity and are conducting KYC/AML checks on our customers. Btw we have an FAQ which might be helpful for some of these questions: https://e-money.com/faq/
Q: Can you name some of NGM’s key achievements and what milestones are you currently working on?
Martin: Our roadmap contains a good list of past achievements and what’s next:
Notably, we’re working on:
-Mainnet upgrade in a few weeks to deliver improvements to the DEX and private sale funds to vesting accounts
-Web based onboarding of users to buy/sell stablecoins on our website
-Nice web UI for the DEX
-WASM smart contracting support
-Credit card payments
And obviously distribution of our tokens through partner projects and directly with centralised exchanges.
Q: Do all e-Money tokens have a physical backup? Do you plan to open audits of these funds or will everything be kept “private”? Is this going to be the net USDT? How do you plan to integrate people who do not handle crypto currencies into the use of e-Money? Do you plan to open an academy or a guide for the use of this platform?
Martin: We are all about transparency as otherwise the tokens have little real world utility. People have tolerated USDT because there were no better alternatives, but this is changing and not just because of e-Money.
Adoption of non-crypto people will happen in the same way as with mobile payment solutions that are also widely used in-store. But instead of the traditional bank/card-based payment infrastructure underneath, we can offer some amazing improvements to merchants. Fixed low fees (not percentage). Instant settlement is also important to small businesses as their liquidity will improve. They no longer need to wait for weeks to receive funds.
Q: Do you have any CoinBurn / BuyBack systems or any Token Burn plans to increase the value of tokena and attract investors to invest?
Martin: Yes, there is buyback of NGM tokens which are then burned. They are bought automatically on the e-Money DEX, against the stablecoins held in the buyback pool. The buyback pool is financed by a 1% inflation of all stablecoins issued. As you can imagine, as stablecoin issuance grows so will the buyback pool.
Q: How can I participate in Governance
Martin: There is no governance mechanism built into the e-Money chain. At its heart, currency-backed stablecoin issuance is heavily centralised. You need a legal entity (company) to establish banking relationships and comply with regulation. So practically speaking it would not make sense to have a governance mechanism that made some decision that the stablecoin issuer (company) would be unable to execute.
Q: There are 3 core issues prevalent in crypto and blockchain:
Security, Interoperability, and Scalability.
How does your project plan to overcome these issues?
Martin: We identified these issues early and this is why we chose to build on Cosmos technology in 2017. Since then other projects have come along to offer their own solutions, but so far we have been happy with the decision to go with Cosmos. Even so, we will obviously look to boost adoption of our stablecoins by integrating with other networks as well.
Q: Does e-money have any partnership presently?
Martin: In addition to the partnerships listed on our website (https://e-money.com/partners), we will have some very exciting announcements in the coming weeks. 😄
Q: How well have you prepared for e-Money mainnet as well as NGM Token Generation Event? Are there any outstanding milestones?
Martin: We launched the e-Money mainnet in March so it is up and running already: https://e-money.network/
We will do an upgrade in the coming weeks to implement some changes to our token model, improve the DEX, and also to deliver private sale tokens. This will be followed by an exchange listing. On the current mainnet the NGM token is non-transferable, this restriction is lifted with the next mainnet upgrade.
I invite everyone here to join our Telegram group for updates: http://t.me/emoney_com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/emoney_com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/e-money/
GitHub: https://github.com/e-money
