Electroneum Ready for Launch! Exciting Future Ahead
Great news has just been announced for holders of Electroneum and those interested in the project.
Founder Richard Ells has just revealed via e-mail that Electroneum will launch in the middle of next week and token holders will then get access to their wallets.
It also means Android users will be able to download the app and start mining Electroneum coins, although iPhone users will have to wait a little bit longer until the app is available on iOS.
Apparently Hacker One, an outside agency employed by Electroneum to test and improve their online security systems, have finished their testing and found no major problems.
This is excellent news and is exactly what holders of Electroneum had been waiting to hear.
Now the entire community is just eagerly awaiting the release of the wallets and mobile mining app and then the Electroneum story can really begin!
How might this all unfold though? What do Electroneum have in store and how can they take this truly global and really get it to go mainstream, as is their stated aim?
We will take a look at this in more detail below.
Electroneum – An Exciting Future
Richard Ells also announced in his e-mail that they have been:
“Contacting hundreds of potential partners to ensure we have some joint ventures already negotiated for once we are up and running. Hopefully by the time we launch next week, we will have something signed and have our first public partnership(s) in place.”
That is great news and should hopefully allow for the rapid adoption of Electroneum within other platforms and networks.
There has also been talk of Electroneum partnering with an African mobile phone company, which would be massive news for Electroneum and allow it to reach a large, captive audience.
In terms of marketing, we expect that given how impressive they were at marketing during the ICO phase, the Electroneum team should be well capable of creating a good deal of hype and excitement about the project to help it go viral.
We would expect some celebrity endorsements to be forthcoming as well as cross-platform marketing on everything from billboards to newspapers, social media and across the internet.
But we think the most powerful means of spreading the word about Electroneum may well be word of mouth. Already we are hearing people talking about Electroneum who aren’t otherwise interested in cryptocurrencies, other than having heard of Bitcoin of course. That is a really good sign.
Once people realise that they can mine what is essentially free money on their phone, Electroneum is likely to spread like wildfire. After all, who doesn’t like the idea of free money?
Perhaps the biggest opportunity for this and where Electroneum will have the greatest impact though is the “unbanked” parts of the world such as Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America.
The “Unbanked” and Electroneum’s Potential to Bring Cryptos to the Masses
Whilst Electroneum has the potential to take off just about everywhere, clearly it has the greatest potential in places where mining $10-$20 worth of ETN per month would represent a substantial amount of money, such as parts of Africa.
It will also be very useful for the “unbanked” – the over 200 million people who have a smartphone but don’t have access to a bank account.
For these people, Electroneum could be a means of gaining access to goods, services, businesses and a global marketplace they were previously blocked from.
The potential of this to revolutionise trade and more importantly – individual people’s lives – could be immense.
As some have pointed out however, there is also the question of what people will do once they have mined Electroneum. How will they spend or use it?
How Can People Spend or Use their Electroneum?
This is probably the biggest immediate question facing the Electroneum project. If people can’t spend or use their Electroneum easily then it will lose a good deal of its attraction.
The most obvious and simple answer would be for people to go to an exchange like HitBTC or Bittrex and exchange their Electroneum for another cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin or Ethereum and then convert it to fiat via a site such as Coinbase or Blockchain.info.
However, often exchanges aren’t very user-friendly to say the least, have very little instruction on how to use them, require you to verify your personal details and have virtually no support – or it takes a few days for someone to get back to you typically.
So most people probably aren’t going to go through the hassle of figuring out how to use an exchange and undertake all the other steps involved.
Plus that option is no help to the unbanked as they still wouldn’t be able to send their converted fiat money to their bank account (as they don’t have one!)
No, it seems there will need to be easier options for people to spend their Electroneum. Here we have a look at some potential options:-
- – Naga Coin – a cryptocurrency currently undergoing its ICO, Naga will offer users a cryptocurrency wallet that will allow them to convert a range of cryptos into fiat currency, which can then be sent to the Naga debit card and used for spending in the real world. The Naga wallet is due to be launched on 1st April 2018.
- – TenX – similarly, TenX will allow users to convert a range of cryptos into fiat currency and then send that to a debit card that can be used for real world purchases. If you are in Europe you can already get one of these cards. They are currently working on setting up partnerships with card providers for the rest of the world.
- – Crypterium – also in ICO phase, this will be a “mobile crypto bank” that amongst other things will allow people to pay in cryptos via their phone, using Apple Pay, Samsung Pay or Android Pay at 42 million stores worldwide. It is not clear when this will be available – on their website it just says “soon.”
So essentially it seems that there are no options immediately available for people to spend their Electroneum without needing to use an exchange first, but such facilities should be available soon.
And it should be noted that none of the projects above mention using Electroneum at the current time, although we expect ETN will be added to their platforms given the level of user adoption expected.
In terms of these projects, it seems to us that Crypterium will be the most useful to the unbanked and those in the non-industrialised world as it will allow payments via your phone and won’t require a debit card.
Of course, it could be that Electroneum will set up their own wallet similar to those we have described above that will allow people to spend their ETN directly using their phone without needing to convert it first via an exchange.
On the other side of the coin, so to speak, will be that merchants could choose to accept payments in Electroneum, much as many thousands of merchants already accept Bitcoin. We understand that there is already a group of businesses on a Telegram channel promising that they will accept ETN as a form of payment, which is good news.
However, for Electroneum to really gain widespread adoption, then in our opinion it needs to be accepted widely as a matter of course rather than just a (relatively) small number of merchants.
For that to happen it needs to be developed from the payments side, so that you can use it to pay as easily as you can with Visa or Mastercard the world over.
Final Thoughts – The Future of Electroneum
We expect these issues will be sorted out in time and you will be able to use your ETN for purchases and transactions.
There seems to be a lot of progress in that direction and it is good to see a number of different projects working on the same problem. That means there is a greater chance of seeing crypto payments in the real world coming to fruition soon.
Of course there is more to Electroneum than just payments. They will be aiming to be incorporated within the online gaming (video games) and gambling worlds, which again should be very achievable given the number of Electroneum users expected.
And there could be other projects Richard and the team are working on that we don’t know about currently.
So overall the future of Electroneum looks very bright now that the security issues have been sorted out and we should look forward to exciting developments in the coming weeks and months.
Oh, and did we forget to mention that at the time of writing the price is up more than tenfold from the ICO?
Sit tight everyone, this could be one hell of a ride!
Disclaimer: we are not financial advisors and the above article should not be taken as financial advice. Please do your own due diligence and research and take professional financial advice before investing. All cryptocurrencies are risky ventures so please only invest money you can afford to lose.
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Update 20th October 2017
Please note the Token Sale for Electroneum has closed early after the hard cap of $40m was raised.
The mining app for Electroneum is due to launch on 1st November.
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Cryptocurrencies are all the rage this year.
Bitcoin, the biggest crypto by far, is up an astonishing 350% in 2017, up over 1000% in the last 12 months and a mind-boggling 23,000% on five years ago.
People who invested just a few hundred dollars in the early days of Bitcoin are now millionaires.
There have been plenty of other cryptos that have gone up 1000% in a matter of days. It’s been a modern-day gold rush for some shrewd investors.
The latest big crypto to launch is called Electroneum and it’s the first British cryptocurrency.
Its USP is that it is super-simple to use and can be managed from a smartphone.
Richard Ells, founder of Electroneum and experienced tech entrepreneur, said:
“I don’t know if you’ve ever tried buying any Bitcoin, but it’s really hard to do! I realized that what the world needs is a cryptocurrency that is genuinely easy to access and use. We’ve developed Electroneum with the ordinary mobile user in mind.”
So Electroneum could become the mobile cryptocurrency of choice, allowing people to buy goods, send money to friends or make international transactions at the touch of a smartphone button and without all the annoying bank fees. And it has a huge potential market of 2.2 billion smartphone users.
Duncan Logan the CEO of Rocketspace who nurtured the likes of Uber, Spotify and Hootsuite has been publicising his support via Twitter and says this is the first ICO he is going to be involved in, out of the hundreds that have happened so far.
It is also the first one we have been involved in too as we do like the sound of it.
You can check out Electroneum here.
Token Sale Update 17th October 2017 – Breaking Records!
Wow how things have taken off for the ICO!
The Token Sale (which is like an IPO) has been absolutely smashing it – they have now raised a whopping $40m – and counting!
It seems like they have really tapped into something novel here and people are responding.
Electoneum will be the first mobile cryptocurrency that you can manage entirely from an app on your phone.
It will initially target the gaming market, so you will be able to earn tokens while playing games.
But here’s the really clever bit: you will be able to mine it from your phone, meaning you can have it running in the background making you tokens while you sleep! These tokens could then be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies or even pounds, euros and dollars!
Now you won’t be making very much to begin with, but if the value of Electroneum increases, so will the value of those tokens you’ve mined.
So the more viral the app goes and the more people that use it, the more the value of Electroneum should increase.
It’s a genius idea really.
And people have been waking up to its potential. Even former Spurs manager Harry Redknapp has been getting involved!
The number of people joining the ICO has been incredible. It has been smashing all other ICOs to pieces.
Here are the numbers on some of the biggest ICOs happening at the moment in terms of number of people involved:
· LA Token – 17,000 participants
· Cobinhood – 10,000 participants
· Enjiin Coin – 15,000 participants
Those aren’t bad numbers at all, and actually represent some of the biggest ICOs to date in terms of numbers of participants. But Electroneum is absolutely blowing them out of the water.
As we write this update, it currently has over 200,000 participants! We understand that’s a record.
It’s astonishing, Electroneum is smashing the competition more than ten-fold and still has two weeks to run! And it’s gone up by over 50,000 in just the last day!
Essentially the value of a cryptocurrency is driven by demand – how many people want it. So the signs for Electroneum at this stage are very good indeed.
Once the token sale ends on 31st October, the aim is for Electroneum to be listed on some of the cryptocurrency exchanges (like CEX.io), so at that point you could exchange your Electroneum for other cryptocurrencies or normal currency.
But we personally plan to hold this long term, certainly if it continues going viral like it has been. If it could get just a fraction of Bitcoin’s value it would be worth a significant amount.
Please be aware if you are going to invest that whilst some cryptos have done amazingly well, they are highly speculative and carry a significant element of risk, so only risk money you can afford to lose.
Just a reminder that the token sale closes on 31st October 2017 – so don’t miss out on what is looking like the biggest ICO ever.
You can check out Electroneum here
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