When was the last time you bought a coffee or a t-shirt with Sumerian mĕnē, Roman denarius or Ruthenian hrývna? All these coins used to be real money. Actually, they continue to be considered ‘money’ and numismatists are ready to pay crazy sums of the modern currencies (a.k.a. “real money”) to get ahold of them. However, mĕnē, denarius and hrývna are not valid currencies anymore.
In order to be called a “currency”, money has to provide a medium of exchange. The more live transactions such a medium has, the greater the value of the currency enabling it. Over a year ago, our key founder decided he can do something about all this. And he started assembling a great team to create an instrument that will facilitate the medium of exchange for various modern cryptocurrencies.
Originally, our main idea was to create a simple and powerful tool for accepting cryptocurrencies. However, over time we found there’s a bigger problem to solve in the blockchain community. In fact, there are several problems that augment each other:
- Very few people are actually using cryptocurrencies for everyday payments. Nowadays, it is mostly an investment instrument akin to a share or a bond. In other words, if you bought a cup of coffee with Bitcoin in May 2017, in December 2017 that already was a new car. If you did the same in December 2010, in 2017 that would have been an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in Marin County. This trend will only continue, no matter what kind of panic we are going to see within the next several months.
- Nevertheless, if you still want to pay with crypto in your favorite cafe, it usually involves some applied cryptography, understanding the nature of transaction fees in order to avoid fees that are several times bigger than the transaction itself, and cybersecurity awareness on a level of a national security agency.
- Even if you somehow managed to navigate through all the nuances of the previous items, sooner or later you will discover that your only motivation of paying with crypto is the desire to prove to the World that it is actually possible. It reminds one of using Linux before Ubuntu or driving an electric car for long distances before Tesla superchargers or ChaDeMo (please, don’t ask how do we know this).
Paytomat tackles each of the three issues:
- We aim to be the Point-of-Sale payments ecosystem with the largest number of currencies that are available on the market. We plan to cover not only cryptocurrencies but fiat ones as well. Our payment processing gateways allow instant conversion into various fiat currencies via our local payment solution providers. This approach will enable our customers to leverage their crypto, keeping the one that has the best investment potential at the moment. At the same time, our payment gateways will allow instant conversion of the transaction source crypto into the fiat or target crypto of our merchant’s preference. This solution will protect our merchants based on their payout preferences.
- We created the new wallet architecture and plan to release the Paytomat wallet Android app in the first quarter of 2018. It’s useless to speak words without showing the actual code, so wait for the release and trust us, that the Paytomat wallet will provide its customers with an impressive level of usability and security.
- We motivate our end customers and merchants who install our solution with a loyalty program, in fact: two separate loyalty programs. PTM coin motivates merchants to install our solution and start accepting crypto, thus turning the “cryptomoney” whose core teams are our clients on the other side, from the digital mĕnē, denarius, and hrývna into real currencies. In turn, PTX token motivates the end customers to spend their crypto by providing a classic rewards program.
While there are established players, such as Bitpay, Coinbase, and Bitgo, who are already enjoying massive success on this market, we believe there’s a deep blue ocean in both the market outreach and the feature set. That’s why for the last 6 months Paytomat has been working hard to release several iterations of our main product and test it in our home market.
Today we have an awesome announcement. However, before we can do that, let’s take a quick recap of our recent achievements.
The Retrospective
Q2 2017
Our original goal was to enable Point-of-Sale systems to accept cryptocurrency. In order to make that happen, we had to create a flexible and robust architecture, allowing us to build a lasting relationship with any type of POS vendors.
Gradually we’ve defined four major components that are playing a very crucial role during the processing of each transaction on our network:
- Transactions Database;
- A set of APIs enabling in and out access to the database;
- Control Panels for clients to manage their customer journey within the system;
- Processing Server, controlling the Database, APIs and Control Panels.
The first cryptos we enabled back in June were Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dash. Since the other two are Bitcoin forks, it took only a couple of weeks to set up and test the basic functionality of receiving crypto and generating invoices.
Simultaneously we started to work with Dash DAO, which is the first ever decentralized autonomous organization in the World. Our original IT partner was Profit Solutions, which is one of the biggest POS vendors in Ukraine. Our mutual goal was helping merchants to start accepting crypto. We completed this goal in less than two months, on a small development grant from DASH.
In order to keep track of all of the transactions and manage merchant details, we built up an admin panel for our internal use. This panel will evolve into the Merchant’s Control Panel in the first quarter of 2018. Every business owner will be able to connect her credit card or bank account to receive any crypto payments in fiat currency after we perform an instant exchange from crypto to fiat.
Q3 2017
In the third quarter, we focused on the development of our client base and creating brand awareness on our local market. Over the course of those months, we helped up to 50 merchants start accepting cryptocurrency. The most popular place is a chain of family restaurants Pesto Cafe where Ukrainian crypto gatherings occur regularly. We then invested huge amounts of time on discovering and fixing various software bugs.
Q4 2017
Several big clients approached us in November. They had Poster POS and wanted to start accepting crypto as well. The implementation for Poster was a little bit harder to accomplish because each new extra feature is a separate application in their marketplace.
As a result, we now have a client base of over 2000 merchants across the globe. While our product progressed smoothly, we still were struggling to find our niche in the blockchain space. So we organized a Google design sprint at the end of December.
Q1 2018
In January we integrated with the third biggest post-Soviet software. It is 1C, which is leading accounting software that accomplishes various business tasks for enterprises, including business accounting, HR, CRM, and MRP. With over 1,000,000 companies that can put Paytomat in the top-5 cryptocurrency processing solutions in the world.
In terms of clients, we partnered with the biggest food delivery network in Ukraine Eda.ua, uniting over 1,500 merchants. The final release of the Eda.ua integration is scheduled in the next couple of months. We are also expanding our outreach to Georgia, Netherlands, UK, and several other countries soon.
Moving Forward
To fuel the Paytomat ecosystem and develop an advanced type of cryptocurrency payment network we’re conducting a Token Sale. On a global scale, our vision is way beyond software implementation. We want to be participants (or more likely initiators) of a movement that will influence global and local policymaking in favor of crypto.
However because we offer a POS solution and crypto-to-fiat payment processing gateways, our business is vulnerable to regulatory changes. Therefore, long term mitigation of those is one of our ultimate goals.
Paytomat Token Sale will be divided into few stages with core teams and founders of cryptocurrencies as our main investors. We’ve already established tight relationships with several teams and are planning on expansion to create a strong reputation in the blockchain space.
