POWERING THE TOKENIZED ECONOMY
The advent of crypto commerce is transforming online marketplaces as we know them.
Currently standing at a whopping US$2.2 trillion, the global e-commerce industry is set to grow to over US$4 trillion in worth by 2021, with Asia-Pacific projected to remain the world’s largest retail e-commerce market. Concurrently, cryptocurrencies and tokens are gradually becoming the preferred digital lifestyle asset of merchants and consumers who are hungry for instant, value-creating social interactions. The result is the emergence of the tokenized economy: a global marketplace that transacts with multiple appreciating crypto assets.
Redefining Value
When major online retailers like OpenBazaar and Amazon integrate, accept and promote cryptocurrency as payment instruments, it is interesting to explore the edge that crypto commerce holds over traditional fiat commerce. One of the main advantages of crypto commerce is that the value of conducting a business exchange is no longer quantified simply in terms of a fixed fiat amount. While product value remains a key determinant of a sale, crypto commerce adds another dimension of value – monetary value – to a trade. Monetary value in a tokenized ecosystem is measured in terms of a coin’s appreciating potential, its acceptance and its liquidity. Traditional methods of appraising overall trade value are therefore replaced with modern parameters of assessment in a tokenized world.
Considering this, depreciating fiat money is becoming increasingly irrelevant to merchants, as are store loyalty points that are designed for limited use only within a specific brand’s community. Token rewards offer universal buying leverage and instant spending power, hence introducing a fundamental change in value definition and reward relevance for both sellers and buyers. This gives cryptocurrency technologists the opportunity to shape their visions of a tokenized economic hub.
Enhancing Consumer Freedom
“With fiat-based businesses, there are all kinds of intermediary regulations, controls and processes in the way money moves between legitimate people,” says Daniel Dabek, Founder and Chief Architect of Safex, a decentralized marketplace that for the first time in history shifts the paradigm of trade towards crypto commerce. “Cryptocurrency has destroyed that barrier. People can find a utility case for themselves. They can find products to pay with cryptocurrency and find businesses to transact with cryptocurrency. They no longer need to rely on the speculative nature of cryptocurrency to value it, because cryptocurrency has changed the way that we do and value everything, especially trading.”
What drives people to support and advocate peer-to-peer transactions is the cost- cutting freedom and privacy such transactions create for trading in an exclusive manner. Using blockchain technology, crypto commerce offers decentralized payment solutions which cut out all intermediaries formally involved at every step of the fiat transactional chain on a centralized server. This ledger-to-ledger solution thus eliminates most, if not almost all risk of exposure to third-party companies and systems which would otherwise have access to a user’s private data, passwords, browsing history and other traceable records when processed through a central authority. In a tokenized economy, everyone in a transaction is an end-user, with blockchain technology verifying undisputable records.
A Secure Future
As more value is being generated and stored within the tokenized marketplace, security and protection of digital assets are paramount, with the trust between merchants and consumers taking centre stage. This is what spurred Group Founder and Chairman Nguyen Hoa Binh of NextTech Asia, to lead the way for optimizing secure user verification and payment solutions with a token-driven e-commerce and e-logistics ecosystem. Having earned a reputation of the ‘Alibaba of Vietnam’, NextTech Asia will soon begin its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for VeriME, a decentralized Verification-as-a-Service (VaaS) ecosystem operating from the customer’s mobile phone. The service will identify and authenticate the customer with convenience as well as dramatic savings in verification cost, and is validated by key partners such as Vietnam’s largest payment gateway, NganLuong.
Today, about 6 billion people – 82% of the world’s 7.6 billion population – own a mobile phone. Even without fiat money stored in a bank, consumers can create new spending power and economies through access to coins, tokens and digital assets on their mobile devices. Online mobile wallets have transformed into personal wealth vaults where each individual’s crypto assets can appreciate in value and be traded. The rate of token-based transactions can therefore only increase exponentially as crypto commerce continues to generate new value and reward relevance for communities in an increasingly secure and trusted digital world.
About The Writer
Jean Y Foo is an international speaker, trainer and educator on cryptocurrency, entrepreneurship, education and financial technology. Jean is the CEO of CryptoMission, an education unit of DasCoin powered by NetLeaders. She is advisor to Cryptodemy in Vietnam, a learning institute for cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors. Jean is the Founder and CEO of Mastermind Crate, the world’s premier supplier of K-12 business skills and entrepreneurship learning resources for schools, families, collaborative spaces and club programmes.
This article was first printed in MillionaireAsia Issue 47 - Mar 2018
