Electroneum (ETN) Overview: Product is allegedly ready, which institution will be first to test it out?
Electroneum has been showing signs of life as of late. Opening the month of August with $0.011243/148 satoshi, the currency went on a slow, painful drop which ended a whole month later. On September 6th Electroneum bottomed out at $0.004910/77 satoshi and went into a sideways pattern which ended abruptly just 12 days later. On the 18th, Electroneum exploded into a run which peaked on the 23rd at $0.016818/251 satoshi, effectively tripling the currency’s value in just 5 days. Since then, the currency corrected and remained in a sideways pattern.
Electroneum can be purchased for $0.012322 USD (-2.54% drop in the last 24 hours)/193 satoshi (1.12% rise in the last 24 hours). ETN boasts a daily trade volume of 193 BTC, most of it coming from Cryptopia (44%) and KuCoin (35%). With a market cap of $98,271,463, Electroneum is currently the 63rd most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
The mobile friendly cryptocurrency has been filling the news brackets for all the right reasons in the last couple of weeks. Most notably, the project’s Instant Payment system went into live beta just a couple of weeks ago. The project themselves explained that this launch signifies a groundbreaking move “that brings together the best of blockchain’s decentralization and the modern world’s fast payment technology”.
?Read our comparison of Dash versus bitcoin
The slowness of the current blockchain-based solutions has been a well-known issue from the initial Bitcoin steps in 2009, one that was likely the biggest hindrance to development of widely accepted cryptocurrency payment systems. This apparently isn’t an issue anymore as Electroneum created an instant payment notification system which has Electroneum act as a trusted third party, allowing for instant transactions on the blockchain. The project’s CEO Richard Ellis recently confirmed that the project’s KYC/AML features are live as well.
Project’s team describes their approach the best:
“Once the buyer transfers ETN to the seller, Electroneum confirms the transactions in real-time to both parties. Behind the scenes, Electroneum “reserves” the funds in the buyer’s wallet so that it can’t be spent again, and proceeds to transfer the reserved ETN to the seller’s wallet via the ETN blockchain.
If the transaction fails the first time for whatever reason, Electroneum will re-attempt the transaction behind the scenes until it is successful. As said in the blog post describing this technology, the seller should have his/her funds within an hour.”
What this means is that the payments themselves aren’t exactly instant, as the vendors are given only a notification that the customer has paid; the cryptocurrency will arrive in the vendor’s wallet as soon as it gets enough verifications. More details about Electroneum’s transaction process can be found it their official announcement.
The system has both a buyer and a vendor app which is suitable for a wide variety of product/service providers (restaurants, bars, festivals, grocery stores, e-commerce etc). The image below shows the complete payments ecosystem that the project envisioned.
Overall, it’s a move forward for the platform, one that puts it ahead of competitors ( including Ripple, Stellar Lumens, Dash, and other projects looking to gain a firm foothold in the market of global remittance) in terms of having a working, “instant transaction” product. What’s left now is that project gets tested and adopted by major vendors and financial services like PayPal.
There are a couple of issues here. The main one is whether or not these vendors and potential customers will feel comfortable with using the third party currency handling system that Electroneum offers. The other issue is Electroneum’s shady and invasive internet marketing practices. Just a couple of days ago we saw this post, titled “Sh*t Shills Say — Episode 1 ft. Electroneum”, published on Medium. The post that was made by a moderator of Reddit’s r/cryptocurrency described how Electroneum forum users/moderators brigaded Reddit posts related to their cryptocurrency and attempted to artificially boost said posts popularity and upvotes. To say that they are the only cryptocurrency that does that would be unfair but it really is something that leaves a poor taste in the mouth afterwards.
Electroneum set forward on a mission to launch their own idea of an instant payment system and they have achieved their goals. Their notification based payments are fully operational and can be tested by downloading the provided apps. It remains to be seen if this will be enough to make Electroneum the dominant global remittance platform of the future.
