In late August, ClearPoll announced the launch of what had been billed as a disruptive new app that may well over-turn the polling industry as we know it.
But whilst the Australian team behind the project may have built a truly revolutionary product – thanks to blockchain technology, poll results can now be rendered fully transparent and resistant to manipulation – there is recognition that it is not necessarily the tech itself that will ultimately lead to mass adoption.
To achieve that goal, the team at ClearPoll decided to adopt a strategy that seeks to make its platform’s native token entirely invisible to purchasers of their end-product. In other words, statistics houses and others consumers of Clearpoll data will purchase its data analytics using traditional payment methods.
The Clearpoll platform itself will act as an intermediary which purchases the necessary POLL token on the back-end which is required to make use of its services. It is an acknowledgement that the world might not yet be quite ready for crytpo. It is an acknowledgement that crypto-based products starting out right now will need to accommodate traditional fiat. Hybrid, some are beginning to conclude, may just be the best approach.
Crypto a Complement to Fiat, Not a Competitor
The project team behind Cryptyk, arguably one of the higher profile ICOs doing the rounds at this moment in time, has itself adopted a Clearpoll-type approach. The outfit is setting out to build a solution which adds a plug-and-play security layer to existing cloud-based services such as those offered by Google, Amazon and Dropbox. The team are firm in their intention in offering clients the ability to pay for their services in traditional fiat.
To achieve this, the project’s engineers have been building an interface on the back-end that will translate fiat payments into purchases of its native CTK token.
“Clients can pay in CTK – and some may even choose to do so – but our platform will integrate traditional fiat payment mechanisms. Purchases of CTK token, which are required to access our products and services, will be performed on the back-end out of sight of the end user,” states Melquiades Olivares, the Cryptyk project’s community manager.
Cryptyk is joining a growing number of ICOs who are now recognising that crypto is still in its infancy and acquiring it is rarely a smooth and painless process. There is growing acknowledgement that requiring users to pay for products and services directly with a platform’s native token simply acts as a barrier to wider adoption.
Added Security
Whilst a hybrid fiat-token interface is not one that is typically welcomed by the libertarian die-hards who often dominate the debates surrounding crypto, it does appear – ironically – to offer security to token holders.
At the beginning of August, DigiPulse – an ICO dating from 2017 and which has been building solutions for the nascent crypto-inheritance industry – decided, in a somewhat controversial move, to de-tokenise its entire business model.
The project’s CEO, Normund Kvilis explained to his initial token investors that he had decided to move over to a traditional equity model after observing that purchases made on the new DigiPulse platform – one whose clients have plenty of experience in managing their own cryptocurrency wallets – were paid for almost entirely with traditional fait.
Whilst Kvilis allowed larger token holders to be migrated to a share in the equity of his company, that was not the case for all investors. The case demonstrated one of the lesser known risks associated an ICO investment – de-tokenisation.
It also served up perhaps the greatest irony of this entire Great Crypto Experiment: the token economy is more likely to replace the traditional fiat economy if it simply accommodates it.
