Populous started the past month on a high note, rising to what will turn out to be monthly highs of $9,22 USD/139200 satoshi by July 2nd. Ever since it has been a downwards/sideways movement for the coin, as it trickled down slowly before eventually reaching the monthly low of $4,66 USD/60162 satoshi on July 31st. August seems to be bringing some better times for the currency, as the mentioned July lows were followed up by a solid turn of the month price breakout. As a result of that, one PPT is currently worth $4.77 USD (0.36% rise in the last 24 hours)/64499 satoshi (even better 15,49% breakout in the mentioned timeframe). PPT currently boasts a market cap of $176,566,491 USD, which makes it the 53rd most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
The project sets its aim on the $3 trillion USD business of invoice financing. Investopedia describes invoice financing as “A way for businesses to borrow money based on amounts due from customers.“ This type of financing allows businesses to improve their cash flows, pay their operating expenses and reinvest their money a lot sooner than they would if they had to wait for their customers to pay their own dues. So basically, you are borrowing money from your customer against his/hers debt to you.
You can also read review of Breadwallet, Armory wallet review and Edge (aka Airbitz) wallet guide.
Populous is a smart contract invoice finance platform on the Ethereum & RSK blockchains. It allows SME owners to upload invoices and then uses blockchain technology, XBRL data and a user’s Altman Z-Score to perform an in-depth credit risk analysis of the borrower, his linked companies and their customers. Once approved, SME owners may get the money to ease cash flow.
The flow of funds within Populous is maintained through Poken, token pegged one-to-one to various fiat currencies of the world. They are used to transfer value from invoice buyers and sellers and can be directly purchased with one of these 4 currencies: USD, GBP, EUR and JPY. Pokens can be used to purchase PPT, the official Populous token which can either be held or used as collateral to invest in Populous invoices. Finally, the platform has a PXT token, which is used as in-house cryptocurrency for the Populous XBRL Platform (PXP). PXP serves as the in-house credit rating platform like Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. Users of the Populous platform can use the PXT tokens to purchase reports from PXP’s researchers on a customer’s financial history.
A couple of things stand out with Populous. First of all, its platform is in beta, and at the time of writing we weren’t able to access it (with an error 502 implying that there is something wrong with their servers). Upon further research, many users seem to be reporting similar errors on their side as well. Populous is currently competing for market share with multi-billion-dollar companies like Amazon and PayPal, along with startups like Behalf, Salt and Fundbox, so breaking out in such a market will be a tough ordeal. There is also a low user base it would seem, as their Telegram chat has only 1600 members and their subreddits are very inactive. The project communication has been poor, and while they run a fairly active Twitter account, many people are asking them questions there that are left unanswered.
For now, Populous seems to still be stuck on ironing out some early kinks and issues. They definitely need to get more businesses to cooperate with/list them to have their invoices filled. Another issue is the lack of PR and marketing, as this lack of communication they are exhibiting doesn’t exactly put confidence into investors and partners, to say the least. Thing is, these issues were present 12 months ago; so they are either REALLY dedicated to development and partnerships or are too busy using the project money to pay for margaritas on some distant tropical beach. The future will tell us more.
