The cryptocurrency market and the blockchain industry are extremely exclusive industries. Meaning, the understanding of the cryptocurrency market and its underlying technology requires a lot of sound understanding of the technology and to be comfortable in the environment you need to understand how things work.
One of the major drawbacks of the cryptocurrency industry, with blockchain in mind, is that there is too much emphasis on the technical aspects of the industry and not enough people, companies and projects are actually working on finding real-world use cases and facilitating them.
The real-world use cases is what Pundi X has created and is working towards facilitating. There is a lot of talk about the cryptocurrency market replacing the fiat currency system we have right now and there is a lot of speculation around the fact that the blockchain may eventually be the cornerstone of all financial institutions in the world, but all of that is in the future.
As of right now and today, a person with cryptocurrency assets cannot easily spend it because of multiple reasons. First and foremost of which is the fact that it is not easily accessible. Secondly, the process of paying using any of your cryptocurrency holdings is time-consuming because of the blockchain’s scalability issues and finally, there is no hardly any supporting equipment that is easily available to facilitate these transactions.
While the second and third reasons are essentially extensions of the first one, there are three of the main reasons that are hindering the blockchain entering our day to day lives. If the cryptocurrencies are to replace the age-old fiat currency system that we use now, it should be as easy to use and as effortless to accept. Which is exactly what Pundi X is working on, the company is trying to make using cryptocurrency as easy as buying bottled water.
Pundi X; Making Cryptocurrency Accessible to Everyone
Pundi X is a company that hails from the Indonesian capital Jakarta. While it has offices all over the world, their first aim is to focus on the Asian countries first. It is co-founded by Zac Cheah who is also the current CEO of the company. The company’s native currency is NPXS.
The main aim of Pundi X as a project is to make the cryptocurrency world accessible to everybody by making it easier to spend using it. This is still a place that the cryptocurrency market lags behind because of its processor heavy underlying technology. The three main problems that the company is tackling with their products are;
- Accessibility
The cryptocurrency market and environment is a highly exclusive space. Even though it has a very high market capitalisation for a market that is under 10 years of maturity and has a lot of participants, the cryptocurrency market is still quite new and people are unsure about it for a variety of reasons.
These reasons include governmental pressure and regulation, regulatory body warnings and basic lack of know-how of the industry and market. But these reasons are causes of the hindrance of entry into the cryptocurrency market.
For people already involved with the cryptocurrency market and with a sizeable holding in crypto, it still remains difficult to actually access them on a day to day basis to buy common things like coffee or milk or the most used example on the Pundi X site; bottled water.
The cryptocurrency assets a person holds is essentially inconsequential to their day-to-day, as long as there is an arduous procedure involved to be able to convert into a useable form and if cryptocurrency is to replace fiat currencies in the future, it has got to get easier to spend them. - Transaction Time
The amount of time the blockchain takes to complete transactions is a problem that is faced across the blockchain industry. It is a very slow and long process that is really a clear reflection of the scalability of the technology.
At the place the market and its top performing cryptocurrency coins are, the blockchains are not prepared to tackle mass adoptions as the blockchains are already fraying under the current trading traffic and volume. - Seamless Switch
The cryptocurrency market and the blockchain industry is very new. The market only turns ten years next year and has been on the receiving end of one too many government witch-hunts that root from a lack of understanding of the market and the average person would rather stay away from the market.
While most of the scepticism that people hold against the market can be attributed to the regulatory concerns that constantly hound the market, there is a large amount of misunderstanding and unfamiliarity that drives this decision to stay away.
In order to promote and encourage mass adoption of the cryptocurrency market and industry, the company is working on products that resemble the financial products that are already available in the market. To enable a seamless switch between the existing financial products to the cryptocurrency products, Pundi X has come up with familiar products that make cryptocurrency seem not all that different.
In order to make it easier to use cryptocurrencies on a daily basis, Pundi X has a line of products that make the integration of the industry easier. The products that the company has come up with have a very similar feel to the methods we use now.
Towards integrating cryptocurrencies seamlessly into our everyday lives these are the products that the company, Pundi X, has.
- The Mobile WalletFor most customers of the cryptocurrency market, the biggest problem they face is the act of storing/remembering their long, complicated private and public keys that essentially allow them access to their cryptocurrency assets. The process is quite cumbersome and is in fact quite unnecessary.
As the use of smartphones in the world goes up, most things that we need a computer or a desktop for are being replaced with small-sized applications on our phones. Traditional finance products too have morphed down to a condensed size to be able to fit onto a small screen.
Pundi X has created its own mobile wallet that stores all the public and private keys and has only primitive authentication process like; passwords, fingerprint scanning and/or facial recognition. By creating this mobile wallet for cryptocurrency assets, Pundi X has bypassed the need to remember keys, the need to access an exchange everytime you need to spend your asset for something and has practically bypassed the arduous process that it is, by condensing it down to an application.
- The Smart CardThis is probably one of the most ingenious applications that the Pundi X company offers to cryptocurrency customers. The adaptation of the widely used Visa and MasterCard products is a stroke of brilliance from the company’s side with their Pundi X’s XPASS Smart Card.
The XPASS Smart Card is an adaptation of the Visa and MasterCard’s debit and credit card in the sense that it can be used to swipe amounts out of your cryptocurrency holdings. The only slight difference being that it is a top-up card.
Because the cryptocurrency industry does not operate in terms of accounts and is predominantly peer-to-peer (apart from centralised exchanges) the Pundi X XPASS Smart Card works on a top-up mechanism where the users can load and spend on their respective cards.
- The Card MachineThe third product that the Pundi X team has come up with is their new card machine. The card machine has integration with the mobile application and can swipe the XPASS card as well. It works in the same way a traditional card machine works with a QR code reader for people who wish to pay with their mobile application.
The idea of this product is to make paying with cryptocurrency easier. If every shop has one of these machines, it becomes an added payment option for the customer.
The Pundi X platform is essentially making the use of cryptocurrency more mainstream and letting more people know of its existence. The company’s aim is to make buying cryptocurrencies just as easy as buying a bottle of water. By retaining the traditional card machine and wallet interface, they have made the transition a little less hard. When something is familiar or similar to what was there before, people are more comfortable with making the switch with an open mind.
Partnerships
The Pundi X team and officials have been busy ever since the conception of the idea. The company in the past couple of years of its existence has managed to strike some very interesting and strategic partnerships that almost assure growth of the company and its products.
Probably the first and most important partnership that Pundi X settled on was that with E2Pay. E2Pay is also co-founded by the President of Pundi X. And hence it shares the similar goals of making a cashless economy. E2Pay has ties with the government and lets people pay their electricity, water and other bills using the application.
The entire Pundi X environment works on the NEM blockchain. And is one of the projects on the blockchain that has shown such significant growth. Since then NEM and Pundi X have collaborated and are working towards making the cryptocurrency market and blockchain solutions more accessible to people.
Another interesting partnership that Pundi X has made is the one with Stellar. These two companies came together to make cross-border payments in the Indonesian Rupiah less costly and much faster than what it is right now. This was a very strategic partnership on both sides, given that Stellar is a silicon-valley based company.
The company has also made multiple partnerships with authorities in blockchain and the government. For example, the Pundi X solution is now a part of Fintech Indonesia’s projects. And Pundi X is also a member of Association of Blockchain.
Achievements and Roadmap
The company and its products are doing remarkably well. The product itself is one that the community was in dire need off. Because everyone owned cryptocurrencies but didn’t know how and where to spend them. Pundi X has lived up to its goal of finding and enabling real-world use cases of the industry.
Their aim for the third quarter of this year was to expand into North and South Americas and set up two offices. The company has successfully set up their first office expansion in South America and news is expected to come soon about the second one. The other two pointers the company wants to achieve by the time this quarter comes to a close is to strike partnerships with banks and governments. By 2019, Pundi X wants to have released at least 50,000 XPOS devices worldwide.
The NPXS
The native currency of the Pundi X platform and ecosystem is the NPXS. It is the same token that the company underwent its ICO with and is currently valued at $0.0014 USD. The low value, right now, can be attributed to the technical correction that the government is currently undergoing. The highest value that the token has ever held is $0.015 USD.
The token, on the platform, can be earned as loyalty rewards every time you use the mobile application or the XPASS card to pay for something.
Considering the highest value ever held by the token being $0.015 and the current state of the market, the prediction for the token, by the end of the year, is ~ $0.0023 USD.
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