A Story of a Token: The Past & the Future.
In 2010, I went to my first music festival in Amsterdam, and it was one of the most uniquely interesting experiences I have had in my life up until that point.
After checking my ticket and entering the hall, I saw long lines of people queuing to exchange euros for plastic round tokens in different colours.
2 metre tall men and women were happily skipping along and holding hands with big bags of colored plastic coins.
Why would you need to give your Euros for plastic? What was special about it?
It turned out these plastic tokens can be exchanged for beer. And if there’s one thing that the Dutch absolutely LOVE — it is their beer.
Yet still i could not bear the fact, this powerful currency called the Euro stood no chance, against a worthless plastic token that can get you a beer.
The only currency allowed in that festival is the plastic one. And while it was VERY valuable inside the walls of the music hall — it held absolutely no value anywhere else. .
If the queue is long and you have bargaining skills, you could find someone and buy off his tokens for a good price.
That was a hustle back then.
Queue outside the hall, buy as many plastic tokens as you can, then turn around and sell them to tipsy partiers inside so they don’t have to go back and queue again. And the beer just continues to flow.
Three hours in that place can teach a lot about money and how it works:
In its simplest definition, money is a way to communicate value in a specific space and time.
The plastic token in the music hall is the money of that event as long as the party was on.
Step outside and go to the parking lot. This money is worthless.
Imagine the feeling you get the next day after emptying pockets full of plastic tokens that cost 100s of euros, because you FOMOd into the long queues and did not want to run out of tokens.
Turns out, it’s not only plastic tokens that can become worthless, but real currencies as well.
Fast Forward to Lebanon in 2022, a country once known to be the Swiss financial district of the Middle East, where the currency collapse has had (and continues to have) a disastrous effect on all aspects of its citizens’ lives.
Although industry experts and thought have extensively discussed the root causes of the problem since it began to spiral out of control — a solution is still not on the horizon.
And while the government and bankers and a whole list of so-called experts have been debating and discussing options and possibilities — the people’s curiosity about cryptocurrencies took off back in 2019 — and it’s been steadily rising since then.
Today it is estimated that 2% of the population is into crypto for three main reasons: speculation, savings, and cross border transactions.
Cryptocurrencies have offered a reliable method of sending and receiving value outside the banking system in a much better, much faster, and much more efficient system than Lebanese banks could ever offer. Most importantly? This system is globally decentralised and is plugged right into the largest economy on the planet: The Internet.
A cryptocurrency address and a device connected to the internet is enough for Sara to receive her payment for the work she’s done for a tech company in Canada.
She receives her money in minutes from the other side of the hemisphere, just like she used to do before 2019 via a bank wire.
The only difference now is that this transfer is virtually instantaneous, and this value she is receiving is her own and she has absolute full control over her own funds.
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In its digital form, Sara has little value for it outside the realm of the digital economy. It is very helpful to pay her Netflix charges, software tools, and Amazon orders, but the landlord needs his payment in cash, and so does the internet service provider, and so on.
Recall the music hall ?
Sara has to go and hustle. She needs to find the person that will take her digital money and give her cash for it. So Sara surfs Telegram groups, Facebook pages, and does detective work on every potential target that will accept to give her cash money in exchange with her cryptocurrency.
This is a delicate operation that carries considerably more risk than a token swap in a music hall. The fact that this is happening in a country like Lebanon at such a critical time makes it all the more dangerous.
This is not just the story of Sara, but tens of 1000s of people who are willing to embark on a steep learning curve and start using crypto — despite its poor UX — just because it is life changing for them and makes a massive difference not just in how they handle their money, but in how they live their life.
Crypto awareness in Lebanon did not start from a government initiative or an IMF support plan. It was started by people, a community who believed in the potential of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in breaking barriers and connecting the world financially in an innovative way.
Technology in and of itself doesn’t DO anything. It is the human layer — and what WE choose to do with this technology — that’s what makes all the difference.
So what is the FLUUS team doing?
At FLUUS we laid down our vision of onboarding the next 1 billion users to the crypto and web3 world. As well, this will contribute to breaking financial barriers.
For that to happen we need crypto-ramping solutions with onboarding methods that users can trust — with a global coverage including popular methods of payment like Cash and Mobile Money that are widely used in emerging markets.
FLUUS Convenient and secure crypto to fiat on/off-ramps are doing just that.
Under a single API and Widget developers can integrate with 3rd party solutions (moonpay, transak, wyre and much more) to provide fiat on/off ramping using methods like debit/credit/apple/google pay. In addition to cash and mobile money using our in-house developed FLUUSpay.
FLUUSpay is the fiat-to-crypto gateway for emerging markets. Fiat in its two forms, cash and mobile mobile money can be converted to stable coins by partnering up with licensed local money transfer operators in more than +10 countries.
Our tokenized network of partners reduces the risk of force majeure in countries where banking infrastructure is too weak or too corrupt to use & provides fee reductions for businesses integrating with FLUUS & users staking FLUUS tokens.
By integrating with Local Money Transfer Operators, FLUUS can offer users of +5 blockchains a method to get in and out the world of WEB 3 and crypto through a network of payment service providers in emerging markets.
Under a single API and Widget developers benefit from a single interface and intelligent selection engine to connect to any provider. Where users across +170 countries will enjoy the support of +100 currencies and +200 cryptocurrencies including top stable coins.
Oh in the mid of excitement telling you a story on the past of tokens and its future, i forgot to introduce myself.
My name is Tey, and i am one of the FLUUS co-founders.
and next time i will share the FLUUS story, how we met.
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by: Tey E.