A translation of an article published on Trade.be, from Dutch to English.
Elitium is a FinTech company at heart.
It’s using blockchain technology to reimagine how people interact with all forms of money. And it’s doing this via a cryptocurrency called EUM — the coin of an innovative Digital Economy whose services include:
- A staking program that rewards users for powering the Digital Economy
- An Elitium card that will connect Fiat and crypto, letting users spend EUM at any merchant that accepts Visa (or withdraw Euros from ATMs)
- A marketplace that will let clients buy unique experiences and products, using EUM to ensure secure, fast, and low-cost international transactions
- A specialist consultancy that will offer Elitium partners (who are yet to use blockchain technology) a way to research and implement it
Elitium believes that in creating a hyper-efficient Digital Economy, the world will better understand the benefits of cryptocurrency, and so be more willing to embrace it. Ultimately, Elitium’s platform could alter expectations around what currency can do.
–––––––Concept–––––––
Currency has evolved from goods to paper, paper to cashless solutions. To unlock its true value: currency must turn digital.
That’s the concept behind Elitium. The team is creating the world’s first Digital Economy: an ecosystem of products and services that comprises innovations across alternative investments, payments, and smart contracts.
This innovative ‘Digital Economy’ is tackling economic challenges head-on, connecting old-world thinking to new-world solutions — with products that promise efficiencies thanks to smart contracts and digital currency, promising:
- 6.5% rewards that fight an era of low-interest rates
- The ability to spend digital currency anywhere in the world and earn cashback
- The opportunity to invest in digital shares to create a perfectly balanced portfolio
Before the blockchain, it was impossible to build this catch-all solution. Not only is Elitium building it. The team is creating a sustainable ecosystem that’s both hyper-efficient and low-cost — as illustrated in this video.
––––––– The Vision–––––––
Elitium came to be after a pilot crypto-payment solution (developed by the Elitium co-founders while working at the digital yacht charter platform Boatsters) proved how clients wanted to pay for yacht charters using cryptocurrency.
An innovative digital wallet let users pay for yacht charters in one of 55 cryptocurrencies. And it created waves in the sector.
Clients used it. Boatsters’ partners wanted to integrate the solution into their platforms. Early success evolved into a fully-fledged vision: to use blockchain technology and smart contracts to recreate the entire luxury lifestyle.
After all, businesses in the luxury sector deal with high-volume transactions and endless processes on a daily basis, while there’s significant trust and security required at every level.
Next, the Elitium co-founders started to explore how blockchain technologies could improve how anyone interacts with money in general. Eventually, they discovered how much in life could be improved with cryptocurrency.
The work inspired a vision to build a suite of products that anyone could use to create value: a Digital Economy covering interactions like holding, spending, investing, and trading a ‘luxury’ currency.
This luxury currency is now the heart of several products, including a staking program, a dedicated smartphone app, the Elitium Suite (a marketplace for goods and services), the Elitium card (a specialist crypto card), and a rewards-based ‘Growth Program.’
––––––– Technology –––––––
At the heart of Elitium’s Digital Economy lies a selection of bespoke technology solutions. First of all, are Elitium’s custom smart contracts.
Custom Smart Contracts
Elitium custom smart contracts automate processes such as yacht charters. In fact, they’re an essential element in increasing the efficiency of the Elitium Digital Economy on the whole.
In essence, smart contracts are lines of code that are stored on a blockchain, which execute automatically when predetermined conditions are met. The benefits of smart contracts in the context of Elitium are significant: they help partners enforce contractual agreements in which all participants can be certain of the outcome.
Custom smart contracts can be used as a transaction gateway protocol within an automated payment procedure and, if implemented correctly, they enable various benefits, including:
- Cost savings: smart contracts remove the need for intermediaries as parties can trust the openly available ledger, with the technology executing the transaction. As such, the additional layer of verification by a 3rd-party is no longer required, and so the associated fees are saved.
- Efficiency: beyond cost reductions, smart contracts offer the potential to reduce the time taken to process both documents and information as every stage executes automatically, without having to wait for human confirmation.
- Autonomy: smart contracts also give parties full control over any agreement. A smart contract can be used on its own. And it can also be implemented in combination with other smart contracts that are triggered upon successful completion of the preceding smart contract: this creates the potential for an ecosystem running on smart contracts in an entirely autonomous way — say, powering an end-to-end yacht charter process.
In-house Staking Protocol
Second is Elitium’s in-house Proof-of-Stake protocol, which is a fork of PivX technology. The protocol powers a staking-specific coin with the ticker EUMS (although if you stake Elitium, you won’t necessarily know you’re staking EUMS).
That’s because the Elitium Staking program was designed to be simple and accessible for all, requiring next-to-no technical knowledge to start staking, which effectively means anyone can stake Elitium to earn up to 6.5% rewards per year.
The staking system works as a web application that forms part of the app experience as well as being available as a standalone service across devices and operating systems — with dedicated cold-storage and multi-signature protection ensuring maximum security.
To start staking, participants simply have to:
- Sign up to the Elitium Dashboard
- Start staking automatically with a deposit of EUM (no minimum, no lock-up)
- Stop staking, and withdraw at any time
Consumer-facing Products
Associated with the above two developments are Elitium’s consumer-facing products: the Elitium app (which includes an AI-enabled personal assistant, Vera), the Elitium Suite, the Elitium card, and the Growth program.
Then, there’s Elitium Capital: the digital share platform that lets businesses tokenize real-world assets to raise funding, while accredited investors can buy digital shares in the assets and earn dividends — or hold onto the digital shares in the hope of making a capital gain.
Each part of the ecosystem is complementary and relies on native cryptocurrency EUM: an ERC-20 utility token.
––––––– Availability and Price –––––––
EUM trades for around $1 per coin (find the latest price on Coinmarketcap).
Elitium users can buy EUM directly from Elitium: just sign up to the dashboard and buy EUM using either a credit or debit card. Alternatively, EUM is available to buy on several leading cryptocurrency exchanges, including:
Elitium has a pipeline of future exchange partners lined up, with new listing announcements made frequently on the official Elitium Telegram channel.
As EUM is an ERC-20 coin, users can store it in any Ethereum-compatible wallet — including MyEtherWallet, MetaMask, or Ledger.
––––––– Roadmap –––––––
Elitium’s Digital Economy is far-reaching. The team has developed the first version of several products within the broader ecosystem, with further updates and new releases planned in over the coming months.
These include:
- The Elitium App v1.0 (a beta version with basic functionality)
- The Growth Program
- Elitium Capital
- The Elitium App v2.0 (the fully-fledged application, including the virtual wallet, Elitium Suite, Vera, and an established network of client products and services)
- Elitium Card
- Elitium Business (including the smart contract/BaaS B2B solution)
–––––––Team & Partnerships –––––––
Elitium benefits from its experienced team and a broad network of industry partners. The expertise starts at the top and cascades right the way through the organization and beyond.
Co-founder and CEO Raoul Milhado is the visionary leader and driven entrepreneur who spearheaded Boatsters move into crypto, paving the path to Elitium. He has evolved the concept based on his experience in yachting, digital marketing, mobile app development, and business development.
Co-founder and CTO Jean-Pierre Morand is the technical specialist and leading blockchain expert with over 20 years of software development experience. He has always been at the forefront of innovative technology, including leading projects on the mass adoption of the internet in France during 1999: he already has five years’ experience in crypto and blockchain development.
Chairman and CFO Collin Nicolaas Gelevert brings 30+ years of experience creating international company structures and applying “out-the-box” business solutions. Collin also has expertise in financial and legal strategy, which are pivotal in keeping Elitium on the right side of regulation.
Key Strategic Partnerships
Elitium remains in partnership with Boatsters, with whom the team will roll out the first real-world use case of its smart contract technology: letting a client ‘charter a yacht on the blockchain.’
Elitium has also partnered with blockchain specialist Syncrasy as part of the Elitium Capital Joint Venture. Syncrasy has 150+ developers with deep experience managing and scaling blockchain solutions, including bringing wholesale cryptocurrency trading to India as well as helping to push blockchain technology into the public consciousness.
Elitium Capital has an agreement with HUSD to use the stablecoin as a liquidy partner on its digital share platform (HUSD is the cryptocurrency solution of Huobi exchange: one of the leading global crypto-exchanges).
––––––– Community –––––––
Community is at the heart of everything Elitium does. The company grew a loyal following in the early days. It then halted promotional activity while focusing on product development — with the upcoming launches in 2020, Elitium has resumed marketing and grown its community at an impressive rate:
- Telegram: 4,100 members (up from 500 in 5 months)
- Instagram: 1,100 followers (up from 300 in 3 months)
- Twitter: 1,600 followers
––––––– Conclusion–––––––
Elitium is a FinTech company building a Digital Economy that serves real-world users. Its native cryptocurrency — EUM — enables the Digital Economy to function, but it’s the interplay of Elitium products that makes this project stand out.
Very few blockchain companies offer a product or currency that holds any real-world value. Elitium’s currency is inherently valuable thanks to the fact Elitium clients can use it in the ecosystem to actively create value: be it through holding, trading, investing, or spending.
Further, as Elitium expands its network of partnerships, its Digital Economy only becomes more valuable as users have more ways to leverage its digital currency. That said, EUM has value in the real world as well, thanks to the Elitium card.
Elitium currently runs on the Ethereum blockchain, as this ensures maximum scalability, as well as compatibility with the world’s leading crypto-wallets and exchanges.
Once Elitium has launched its Growth Program, the Elitium card, Elitium Capital, and other innovations throughout 2020 and beyond — skywards is surely the only direction this company can go.
Register now at www.elitium.io/dashboard and join our official Telegram community by clicking here.
Please note: This is a translation of an originally Dutch article analyzing Elitium (EUM), published on TradeBe. The original article can be found here. As with any translation it is not 100% accurate as minor changes have been made in words and structure, in order to ensure the same high flow of reading for the English-reading user.
