Token: PAY (09/19/2017)
Total 16 / 25
0 Market Information: 3/5
- MarketCap 1D: $215M
- MarketCap Last 30 D: $180M — $436M
- Exchanges listed: Bittrex, BTC9, Liqui, HitBTC, EtherDelta, BTER, COSS, Cryptopia, Gatecoin, Novaexchange, Yunbi
- Tradable Share of Token: 105M / 205M = 51%
1 Competition: 1/1
- TokenCard ($31M): First ICO led for this type of product
- Monaco ($95M): Basically a copy of TokenCard
- Revolut ($400M): No cryptocurrency but is serving the same purpose as they recently added BTC, ETH & LTC to the portfolio of currencies supported by their card that supports exchanges of different fiat currencies at the best exchange rate
2 Technology: 2.5/5
Tl;Dr: TenX aims at allowing you to spend any crypto-currencies (ETH, DASH, LTC, BTC for start) into fiat through their Debit / Credit Card. 0.5% of the transactions will be collected and used to remunerate the PAY owners. Alongside to their B2C product, the TenX team is also building the COMIT network that will be a decentralized exchanged allowing instantaneous transactions. Because COMIT will require a lot of intermediaries and will be open, it would reduce the competitive advantages of holding the PAY tokens.
Pros:
- Different than cash & burn approach of MNC/TKN will allow token holders to get remunerated before continuously vs when they burn their tokens
- Cross-chain approach via COMIT network is interesting and could bring a lot of value to the project
- No fee on funding TenX wallet required for running the PAY debit card
Cons:
- Wallet only available on Android & lame WebApp on iOS
- TenX Whitepaper doesn’t contain any technical information of the TenX product itself, only the COMIT Whitepaper does
- User needs to seed a wallet with fund and their funds do not remain in their control
- COMIT network requires a lot of intermediaries to work (see details below), including Liquidity Providers and it is unclear how the fees vs going through an exchange will be reduce
- COMIT network is not proprietary and nothing would prevent TKN, MNC to use it to process their transactions, hence killing TenX competitive advantage
- If COMIT network succeeds in killing the credit/debit card payment network, it will reduce the fees currently being taken on each transactions by the card providers and therefore the 0.5% currently collected by TenX will need to be drastically reduced to be competitive, reducing the value of the PAY token
- COMIT network is far from being live
What is TenX?
TenX consists of a card and a wallet. The user needs to load the wallet with some cryptocurrencies but no fees are incurred for deposit/withdrawing. The user can get 0.1% delivered in PAY for every purchase they make which is good but still lower than any Credit Card in the US. They raised 1M in March 2017 from investors — but ICO was close so no real risk taken by these investors. They are “rolled-out” to all countries except US.
Remuneration system works as follows: token holders get 0.5% of revenue for holding PAY tokens. This 0.5% comes from the fact that in current credit/debit card ecosystem, merchants pay between 0.5% — 3% to finance their bank, the card scheme (VISA, Mastercard etc…) and the issuing bank (eg. Wavecrest for TenX in that case). The end goal for TenX is also to be able to apply for a banking licence — which is very expensive — to be able to remove one of the intermediary — Wavecrest.
They are also creating a decentralized platform to replace the card scheme and reduce even more the fees that need to be paid upon a transaction.
What is the COMIT network?
TenX advertise its competitive advantage with one technical platform called the COMIT network and plan on integrating on it in Q2 2018. Technically the COMIT network is decentralized exchange allowing cross-chain interaction. This COMIT network should allow them to get rid of the important fees being taken by the fiat/cryptos exchanges but also get rid of the fees being taken by the card scheme in the long term if all transaction settlement goes through the COMIT network.
This COMIT network puts together Users who are issuing the transaction, Businesses who want to get pay and Liquidity Providers (mainly banks or crypro-exchanges) who ensures that these transactions can be settled in milliseconds thanks to the COMIT smart contract (HTLCs). By going off-chain, the COMIT network avoid paying fees to the blockchain, however the liquidity providers are free to set the exchange rates they want for a given currency swap but the higher the fee they’re taking the less likely the transaction is to go through their smart contracts as defined in the transaction routing rules of the COMIT network.
COMIT network requires to work on blockchains using Sha-256 as their hashing function (most of them but not IOTA for instance).
What is the COMIT under the hood?
Technically, the COMIT network relies on 3 technical components:
- Multisig — A & B deposit money in an account and if any money needs to be withdrawn from the bank account, it needs to be signed by both A & B
- Hashing function — no need to explain
- Timelocks: A & B create a rule that says that if neither A or B agree on multi-signing any withdrawal after a certain “timelock” the original deposits are returned to A & B
Merging these three, you can create HTLCs (Hashed Time Locks Contracts). An HTLC opens a P2P channel between two actors of different blockchains going much faster than having to go on chain and through an exchange to get their transactions validated. This is the same logic of Lightning Network and Raiden. The transactions are only written to the blockchains when the you open or close a P2P channel — hence limiting the transactions paid to the blockchains to these two moments out of all the transactions that can happen in the smart contracts. Still because these P2P channels between multiple blockchains have to be kept open and maintained by Liquidity Providers (different from Lightning Network and Raiden), fees cannot be completely removed the transactions.
3 Existing Partnerships: 2.5/5
Card Provider is WaveCrest — using mainly Visa. However, this partnership got cancelled for a lot of countries recently and TenX is looking for a new card issuer.
4 Team: 3/4
Toby Hoenish, CEO:
No clear presence in the crypto-industry. Created Study Pact in Japan but no trace of this company still existing.
Michael Sperk, CTO:
No clear presence in the crypto-industry— very few contributions on Github.
Paul Kittiwong, COO:
No clear presence in the crypto-industry. Now moved to “Co-Founder”, whatever that means.
Julian Hosp, CVO:
Only public person who is also the technical face of TenX and appears to actually know what he is talking about. Former “Coach”.
Chris Miess, CFO:
Former analyst at Goldman. Good that he worked in a bank, not good that he was never a senior.
Warren Goh, Product & User Experience:
No real experience. Now moved to COO.
Bettina Schmidt, Business Operations & CHO:
No real experience. Previously colleague with Julian Hosp.
Tuhina Singh, Blockchain Developer:
Full-time Blockchain Dev Employee — Good.
U-zyn Chua, Blockchain Developer:
Full-time Blockchain Dev Employee — Good.
Vitalik Buterin, Investor via Fenbushi Capital:
Fake.
Bo Shen, Managing Partner at Fenbushi Capital:
Heavy player in the Crypto industry.
David Lee, Angel Investor & Professor at University of Singapore:
Teacher at Stanford, PhD, few publications.
5 Community, Communication & Agenda: 4/5
a) Community:
- Facebook: 14.5k followers
- Twitter: 43.2k followers
b) Communication:
Very dynamic, they have weekly videos and are posting on Twitter every day engaging their community with a lot of transparency and good content. Lot of live hangouts as well.
However, their marketing can sometimes navigates in shady area. As an example, Vitalik has been advertised as one of their direct investors while he specified he was not simply a stakeholder in Fenbushi Capital which actually invested in TenX.
c) Agenda:
Nothing much planned before the end of the year. The main release will be about the COMIT network and maybe their banking licence for 2018.
We may have a nice bump when they are going to announce their new card issuers. Rumors goes about AmEx but this would not prove much more of the solidity of the project.
6 Verdict
TenX is a cool project with great marketing around it — which is mandatory when you are building a community and trying to get into the B2C market. However, TenX does not show any technical edge over its competitor on its actual B2C product. Their main strength could come from the COMIT network whenever this gets implemented — still the decentralized structure of this COMIT network could also be their greatest weakness as any of their competitors will be able to leverage to feed their own growth leaving TenX with nothing else than a shaky partnership with card issuers and a webapp for iOS. Additionally, it is not clear how this COMIT network will provide lower fees than the MNC or TKN swap system given the number leeway that will be provided to Liquidity Providers.
From a pure trading standpoint, they are already present on a lot of exchanges and their valuation is really high hence no expectation of x10 should be expected in the next 3 months.
=> NEUTRAL
APPENDIX:
PAY Whitepaper: https://www.tenx.tech/whitepaper/tenx_whitepaper_final.pdf
COMIT — Blockchainless Whitepaper: http://www.comit.network/doc/COMIT%20white%20paper%20v1.0.2.pdf
COMIT Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8e2ke8U5eE
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