If you're exploring the cryptoverse like me, at some point you will come across Crypto.com. There's no avoiding it, the ads are everywhere, and just the name alone will guide you to their website or app at some point. The company goes back a few years and is probably best known for its crypto visa cards, and their app. They've recently gone through a lot of changes and their own cryptocurrency (CRO) has dropped over 50% in response! Today I want to take a closer look at exactly what the company does, what has happened, and what's next.
So let's just jump right into it!
The company was founded in 2016 as Monaco, with an HQ in Hong Kong, and started as a payments and cryptocurrency company with a mission to accelerate the world鈥檚 transition to cryptocurrency. In 2018 they re-branded to Crypto.com, launched their Visa cards and created their own cryptocurrency, Crypto.com coin (CRO). From then on the company has continued to add more and more products to their lineup.
I'll try to keep this as simple and quick as possible, as there is a lot to talk about!
Crypto.com Pay is a service that allows people and businesses to pay with crypto for free online. It's a program that incetivizes businesses to start accepting crypto at no risk to them.
Crypto.com automatically exchanges the crypto to fiat, and reduces fees to almost 0 compared to 1-3% with other processors. Users receive cashback in CRO, and settlement agents receive fees for the activities performed.
You can also get giftcards, top up prepaid cellphone data, and pay your friends and family with the service.
Crypto.com has several different tiers of crypto Visa cards, each with their own perks and benefits. Below you can see the benefits.
Crypto.com has partnerships with many big name brands, that will certainly attract people to the cards. Also noteworthy is being able to get the interbank exchange rate with the card. This rate is the one you will see on google for example. This means that you don't pay any commision for currency exchanges!
The Crypto.com app is a great place to buy crypto! The app has a modern appealing design, and is easy to navigate. The company regularly adds new cryptos to the app, at the moment you can buy over 80+ cryptocurrencies!
It's one of the easiest ways to buy crypto with some of the lowest fees.
Crypto.com also has a well established exchange where users can trade crypto.
Crypto.com has introduced a couple of new defi features to their platform.
They've added a new app, the DeFi wallet, which is a non custodial wallet that connects to the Crypto.com app. This feature is very similar to the Coinbase wallet.
They introduced the Crypto.com defi swap, this is similar to apps like Uniswap. You can swap cryptos and also provide liquidity to pools.
They created the defi dashboard, where you can follow the latest defi projects.. They've also included a gas meter, so you can stay up to date on the latest gas prices.
And recently they added the supercharger! If you deposit a minimum of 100 CRO into the supercharger you can "charge" and earn a different cryptocurrency each month. You can charge for a maximum of 30 days, and then rewards are paid out over the next 30 days. The interest rate of the supercharger is variable, as of writing it is 15.27%!
Crypto Earn is Crypto.com's staking and interest earning program. Users can deposit the crypto of their choice into the platform and have three options:
The longer you stake the higher your interest rate will be.
This is the most recent picture of all the assets that are available from their website, not included here are Cardano, Polkadot, and Uniswap, with more coming!
The earning rate is different for each currency and can be increased by staking more than 25000 CRO, this amount is way too high at the moment, new users would have to invest almost $1700 USD at current prices.
The screenshot shows staking rates for a 3 month fixed period, without the 25000 CRO staked.
Crypto.com's interest rates for most currencies are not very competitive, when compared to Nexo or Celsius for example. On top of that your interest isn't compounded as often either, if you choose for the longer options. And even with the 25000 CRO staked, you would be earning a similar percentage to other staking/interest services.
Crypto.com also has very high minimums to get started, so for new people starting with crypto this would be a no-go. The screenshot below shows some of the minimums for different currencies.
Crypto credit allows people to deposit their crypto and get instant crypto loans.
Interest rates are again dependant on the amount of CRO staked.
With all these products and developments that they've gone through, you're probably wondering by now what caused the sudden and steep sell-off of CRO.
Well, the company recently lowered the interest rate for staking CRO from 16%, one of the highest rates out there, down to 10%! On top of that it also increased the amount of CRO in staking required for different tiers of their Visa cards. Each card comes with different perks, with that being the main incentive to apply for one, but the company decided to more than double the requirements!
At first they had lowered the staking rate even further down, but after significant backlash, they decided to raise the rates slightly to the numbers I listed above. The company also apologized for the sudden change, and promised in the future to announce big changes ahead of time.
At first this looks really bad. The company literally torpedoed the value of their own cryptocurrency, and gave all their users a nice slap in the face, but there is a reason for all of this.
Crypto credit and debit cards are either under development by lots of companies or being launched. Binance just released its own Binance visa card, and Nexo and Coinbase have cards in development, just to name a few examples. Competition is heating up and Crypto.com has to stay competitive with others to be able to survive and compete. The old model simply wasn't sustainable in this new environment.
Although this doesn't make it any easier for CRO holders, there is an upside here. Making the changes now before other companies can release their cards is a good thing. Crypto.com is still a force to be reckoned with, and the recent decline in the price of CRO will attract lots of new users in my opinion. The company seems to be repostitioning itself for the future, and with users not being able to switch to competitors as of yet, they are likely to stay with Crypto.com and ride out the storm.
The thing I like best about CRO is that the performance of the currency is directly linked to the platform. The company has an incentive to keep developing and improving Crypto.com and all its features to keep increasing the value of CRO.
The obvious downside to all of this is that if the company doesn't perform well, CRO will again decline in value. But CRO isn't much different from other company style tokens, like NEXO, CEL, and BNB.
CRO has many different utilities within the Crypto.com ecosystem, more than most other tokens. The steep sell-off of CRO is slightly worrying though! I would like Crypto.com to find a way to lower some of the minimums to get started with their products, to attract more users and stabilize the price of CRO. Additions like the supercharger are a great first step in this regard!
Crypto.com uses Crypto.com Chain, it's an open source blockchain that is secure and permissionless, and allows people to send low cost instant transactions worldwide. The details are a little complicated, but you can check out their whitepaper here! The company welcomes other developers to contribute to the project.
If you're interested in seeing how people use CRO in their daily lives, their Reddit is full of people sharing their expriences and is definitely worth checking out!
So what does the future hold for Crypto.com?
When you read other peoples articles about Crypto.com on the internet, you kinda either get doom and gloom, or they praise it like it's a superhero. Nobody really knows what will happen, but most likely the company will recover and continue to do well. Sure, Crypto.com is still realtively new and CRO is even younger than that, so it's hard to make any real predictions. From my experience I would say that usually fear and greed take over in situations like these, but we've seen this again and again in both crypto and stock markets, when new technologies get introduced. Look at Tesla stock for example, they've had some wild rides!
I would like to see the platform make it much easier for new crypto users to get involved, like they say their mission is. Some of the minimums to get the higher tiers of visa cards or start staking are just too high for most people. Seasoned crypto traders with large portfolios will feel at home at crypto.com, but new users might find it too intimidating to have to invest large amounts to get started. Companies like Celsius an Nexo can easily take advantage of this and steal customers away from them.
The company continues to innovate and add new features. CRO is still one of the top cryptocurrencies, even after the sell-off and has a market cap of $1,375,485,105 as of writing. This is complete speculation, but I personally belief that when crypto becomes more mainstream, big financial companies and banks around the world will be more interested in takeovers and partnerships with large established companies like Crypto.com, making this a worthy long term investment in my opinion.
Still risks remain, and even though right now might be a very good time to invest in CRO, please do your own research and make sure that you know what you're getting yourself into! Even with Bitcoin almost reaching its all time high, CRO continued to go down for most of the time. I'm glad the company has commited to communicating better, because this is key to building trust going forward.
If you're interested in trying out Crypto.com please consider using my referral link, my code is bewfnfqwqp. By using this link, both you and the person that shares it will earn $25 worth of CRO!
Sorry for the long read, but I really wanted to do a good analysis on Crypto.com. Thank you for taking the time!
I hoped this has helped you, and what do you think of Crypto.com?
