Hive sorely needs more ways to on-ramp fresh capital.
Currently, the blockchain pays out significant amounts of crypto (HIVE and HBD) that is funneled through the exchanges and turned into fiat before leaving the ecosystem. To have a stable economy, we need a matching inflow of fiat that is "on-ramped" into HIVE.
There are unfortunately preciously few avenues for on-ramping to HIVE and not that many reasons to do so.
Indeed, we need people to buy HIVE with fiat so that the price keeps at least stable when our users sell HIVE for fiat. But why would anyone buy HIVE?
Do you see other reasons? Do you think the reasons listed above are sufficient to make the system sustainable in the long term?
Aside from buying HIVE on Binance, we used to have an on-ramper called Transak that allowed direct HIVE purchases with a credit card or a SEPA transfer. Unfortunately, they have recently dropped their support for HIVE for economical reasons. Not enough people were using their HIVE-buying services, so maintaining the on-ramp was not profitable anymore; what signal does that send?
So I was understandably willing to be positively surprised when I read about a new proposal for a partnership with a young company called Zypto.
The proposal is to pay them 20 000 HBD from the community money to "integrate" with Hive ...
That could be good, I thought, especially if they offer on-ramping. It wasn't clear so I checked their website. Form a legal standpoint, on-ramping faces A LOT higher hurdles than off-ramping. The traditional financial system is more than happy to facilitate the return of economic value in the form of fiat money (off-ramping) than to let economic value leave the traditional banking rails and escape in the blockchain and crypto world (on-ramping)
So I wrote an e-mail to Zypto to get more clarity on that topic: are they going to offer on-ramping or only off-ramping?
While waiting for them to reply, I took a closer look at their rather rudimentary website, with no "team" section but claiming a VASP licence "in the EU".
As I have a Master's in EU Law, I noticed the first incongruity: VASP licences are national, not valid "in the EU". The only licence valid throughout the EU is the MiCA "CASP" licence. So Zypto has a VASP licence ... where ? Well, I couldn't find out by visiting zypto.com/legal/ because there, the connection timed out (twice)
Their full name "Zypto SP z O.O." is the Polish equivalent of a "Ltd." company (GmBH in German, Sàrl in French) which might be seen as less solid than a corporation. I wanted to see who's behind so I've searched the web. I found both a Polish website and an website that provided an English report
As you can see, the capital is rather minimal, 5000 PLN or about 1100€ (less than US $1500) and the registered address is in the Polish city of Lodz.
Mid 2024, there seems to be mainly a beauty salon at this address if Google Streetview is to be trusted.
There are two partners, Jean Nasrallah (49%) and Joseph Alexander Parkin (51%). The first seems to be located in Canada while the second appears to be based in Spain.
Now the somewhat more worrying news came from the Quebec (Canada) Financial Market Authority which announces publicly that it has imposed fines (not huge, but still) to M. Jean Nasrallah in connection to an allegedly irregular offering of $FCF and $ZYPTO tokens
I personally would applaud paying 20 000 HBD to welcome a partner that facilitates a smooth on-ramp from fiat to HIVE.
Transak wasn't that smooth but its services were nevertheless very useful because of the great APIs they provided. Could Zypto be that partner that replaces Transak and offers an even better (and cheaper) service?
What do you think?
