What Is TenX? Introduction to PAY Token
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What Is TenX?
TenX (PAY) launched in 2015 with the promise of a digital wallet and physical card letting users spend cryptocurrencies to pay for goods and services. Co-Founder and President Julian Hosp stepped down on January 9, 2019, and was replaced by CEO Toby Hoenisch after the team of 70 (with two heads) failed to fulfill initial orders.
PAY is the proprietary Ethereum-based ERC-20 cryptocurrency token used by the TenX platform. It is a security token that acts as common shares in the TenX organization.
Despite missing initial shipments, TenX assured Twitter followers on January 17, 2019 that cards are being shipped. Its initial speed bump with WaveCrest (the initial financial backer of the cards) was resolved, and the TenX card is now live in Singapore. TenX hopes to expand to other Asian-Pacific and European markets soon.
But it won’t be easy – TenX isn’t the only horse in this race.
Crypto.com (MCO) and Token (TKN) are among the competitors pushing through regulation to release a cryptocurrency payment card for the consumer market. Is the TenX card too late to satisfy scorned backers and early adopters?
To figure that out, we’ll examine PAY, the ERC-20 security token issued by TenX to fund this ambitious fintech project.
PAY Cryptocurrency Summary
The total supply of TenX tokens is 205,218,256 PAY, as of January 21, 2019. The peak price so far was August 21, 2017, several months before Bitcoin pulled the entire cryptocurrency market up in December 2017.
The entire PAY supply is premined. It’s issued in a manner similar to Proof-of-Stake (POS). PAY token holders receive payouts equivalent to 0.5 percent of all aggregate transactions on a monthly basis. Payouts are based on the PAY balance held in an approved wallet.
The TenX ICO was held June 24, 2017, raising approximately $80 million worth of ETH and BTC. Of the remaining supply, about 55 million will be minted over the next 4 years in a community and business development fund. The remaining supply is divided 50/50 between the TenX company and the founding team.
PAY is accepted on a variety of cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bithumb, Bittrex, UPbit, Huobi, Gate.io, and OKEx. Its trading pairs include BTC, USDT, and ETH, and over $7 million worth of PAY is traded on a daily basis.
As an ERC-20 token, PAY can be stored on any ERC20-compatible wallet, including the Trust Wallet and hardware wallets from Trezor and SecuX. PAY can also be stored in the official TenX multicurrency wallet, which also supports BTC, LTC, and ETH.
TenX More Stuff Than You Need to Know
TenX ultimately hopes to be fueled by the Cryptographically-secure Off-chain Multi-asset Instant Transaction (COMIT) network. It’s a separate entity than TenX, though still developed and maintained by the same team.
COMIT uses the COMIT Routing Protocol (CRP) to enable interoperability between blockchains to enable seamless, low-cost token exchanges between them. The CRP is compatible with any blockchain that supports multisig, timelocks, hash functions, and double-spend protection.
Once both the consumer and merchant have wallets connected to the COMIT network, a network of Liquidity Providers (LP) make the verification process simple. It’s a blockchain-based SWIFT competitor.
In fact, the company’s roadmap reveals it plans to release a suite of developer tools to support ETFs, loans, and other financial products. Think of everything the current SWIFT network already does – TenX is trying to fill every gap in every lane it can within the payment processing and consumer fintech sectors.
But COMIT still hasn’t been released as of the start of 2019, and it’s unclear if it’ll still rely on the Ethereum blockchain once the mainnet launches. Maintaining and scaling such a platform is a lot harder (and more expensive) than it sounds, and there are already huge, established players in the space.
TenX has to focus on the fee structure of the actual cards to fund the project. So let’s look at that.
Using the TenX cards has no transaction fees. Instead, users pay a one-time fee of $15 for the physical card ($1.50 for a digital card). If you spend at least $1000 annually on the card, it has no annual fee, which is $10 for users spending below the minimum threshold.
A rewards program was initially planned but has yet to be implemented in the live cards. What the platform does have is a strong set of controls and tools for current users.
You can set daily and overall spending, withdrawal, and purchase limits to ensure your card isn’t used without your permission. This is done using Decentralized Security Smart Contracts (DSS). You can also spend cryptocurrencies, even if the accepting retailer doesn’t accept them.
This is done using a financial intermediary, which was initially WaveCrest. It’s unclear which bank finally backed the cards currently hitting the market, so if you have one, please let us know the issuing bank.
The issuing bank holds the crypto tokens in escrow, giving you the value of fiat currency based on exchange rates at the time the account is ultimately settled. The initial merchant transaction can be settled in under a minute, but it’ll take several days for this process to finalize in the backend.
It’s nothing different than what the crypto competitors are doing, and the only thing that makes it different than legacy companies is the support of cryptocurrencies.
We won’t know how well TenX truly delivers on its brand promise until at least 2020, when cards have been on the market and COMIT is live. Until then, it’s a show-and-prove project.
Summary
TenX has lofty ambitions to make it easy to spend cryptocurrencies just like any other currency. It’s currently only available in Singapore, and even that launch was delayed a lot longer than early backers hoped. Now that the TenX card is live on the market, its success will hinge on these factors.
- TenX has a card-issuing bank backing its crypto-backed debit cards. BTC, LTC, and ETH can be spent as currencies using a backend ledger settlement.
- PAY, the security token issued by TenX, receives monthly (eventually hourly, with scale) dividends of 0.5 percent of gross transaction volumes.
- TenX uses COMIT to enable cross-chain trades without the need of a third-party exchange. This makes for cheaper OTA trades.
With these pieces in place, TenX could be at the right place at the right time. Of course, it’s also that friend that’s always late to the party, and it’s unclear if the public will accept that from a fintech company, cryptocurrency or not.
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