Many third party providers are willing to integrate with us. Fiat handling and other paid services will speed up Mycelium's adoption and generate profits.
Various nations treat Bitcoin businesses very differently. Building a complete service cycle that involves fiat transactions and fees takes a lot of resources for each country. Mycelium chose the way of least interference from fiscal regulations.
The first step was to develop a mature core application that can enjoy a high level of user trust. The second step was to create awareness among various blockchain and p2p service providers. Now we are about to take our third step and integrate a large number of third-party service providers.
Every time you pay your fiat bills with bitcoins in your Mycelium wallet or do some other fiat related things, you pay fees. That's no fun. As an owner of Mycelium tokens, you will know that those expenses may return to you handsomely.
New initiatives such as colored coins and new PoS blockchains will open new opportunities.
We believe that the strongest unsatisfied demand today is for each person to be able to possess and freely exchange several assets in the same convenient manner as people send and receive bitcoins today. Everybody deals with a handful of assets such as currencies, stocks or fund shares, etc. Our vision is to impart bitcoin type of ease to the fiat world. As true bitcoiners, we have lived for several years enjoying an unprecedented level of comfort. Of course, we had to partially adjust our personal economic behavior so the available tools could handle our needs. But we think we should now use this experience and build a service that enjoys the best of bitcoin and fiat worlds.
On one hand we don't see huge demand for smart blockchain based contracts, we think most of the people are still ok with ordinary types. On the other hand, we don't think Bitcoin blockchain is perfect for handling multiple assets. We run both R&D and practical tests on various technologies. Mycelium is not going to lead a new blockchain initiative but we are looking at each new opportunity. The important aspect of this research is to envision the practical steps of reducing the huge burden of high costs of fiat payments. Society as a whole loses three to four percent of GDP there. Reducing these losses is the biggest market in FinTech. No current initiative demonstrates a really promising approach yet.
We expect to benefit from a synergy effect when a new blockchain initiative with the parameters we consider optimal on one side and Mycelium user community on the other join forces. Of course, blockchain based fiat payments will not command fees of 2.9% as incumbent ones do now. But they won't be free either. Another important observation is that the crypto community still misses an easy enough and safe enough exchange tool: a truly distributed marketplace is yet to come. Mycelium has great chances to become an interface for one of them.
The “handle money” paradigm will be extended to multifaceted concepts of personal finance, value administration, and social interaction.