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Status Teller Network
Whitepaper: https://status.im/whitepaper.pdf
Description
One of the core hurdles to the adoption of cryptocurrency is the dificulty in obtaining it. Ease of access is necessary to transition our economies from fiat to digital currency. In order to solve this problem, we propose the implementation of the Status Teller Network, a DApp inside of Status, which provides borderless, peer-to-peer fiat-to-crypto ‘Teller Network’.
The Teller Network allows Stakeholders in the Network to find nearby users to exchange their cash for digital assets and currency, giving any smartphone owner in the world the ability to take control of their personal wealth.
In this sense, Status becomes a piece of a “Web 3.0” banking infrastructure and creates a global people-as-ATM network. This has particular utility in developing markets where cashbased economies are prevalent and credit card penetration remains low, tackling the famous ‘last-mile’ of the remittance market.
The growing trade volumes observed on LocalBitcoins, ~30M USD per week (CoinDance 2017), coupled with the rise of remittance startups built on legacy systems like TransferWise (Crunchbase 2017), serve as a testament to the viability of this model.
SNT Utility Example use-cases
- SNT is required to become a seller. Research case: SNT required for arbitration.
- Stakeholder A, a street vendor in India, becomes a Seller on the Status Teller Network as a means of generating additional revenue.
- Stakeholder B, a father in Argentina, is concerned with the volatility of the Argentine Peso, and finds a nearby Seller to purchase some Gold-backed tokens (DGX) to provide greater security for his family.
- Stakeholder C, a migrant worker in Thailand, is fed up with the high cost of remittance to send money back to her family in Myanmar, and both herself and her partner use the Status Teller Network.
Ideas:
[bgits]: Random idea, I think it would be possible down the line if they are locking up funds in escrow, from a user perspective it may not be that different from locking up in a plasma contract which can allow more frequent transacting with lower costs. An interesting expansion on that is with offchain transactions you might be able to setup atomic swaps cross chain, so BTC/SNT direct trade possibly using lightening for the BTC side.
Interactions with other SNT use cases, and Status Features
Indicators of Trust
With the Status Network Token, we intend to implement a non-exploitable online reputation system based on TrustDavis. Stakeholders can deposit SNT against usernames at a premium, creating a badge indicating a level of value that username holds and the amount of backers they have. This will allow us to establish a base Web of Trust, which will give an indication of how reputable a username is within the network and this can be further developed in the future, for example, with the integration of Trustlines. This value may be used as insurance in escrow based transactions on Ethereum, in the Status Teller Network or wherever reputation can be put at stake
Ideas:
- License contract should be associated to this trust system.
- Obtaining a license should allow you to sell crypto to fiat up to an amount determined in function of the SNT deposited against the username.
- Slashing of the SNT stake would decrease the amount of SNT staked, and max amounts of crypto that can be selled / escrows open at the same time?
Tribute to Talk
Probably we should allow communication between a buyer and the seller so they could perform agreements on how will the payment be done. Research needs to be done to determine how will TtT affect this communication, since if a seller sets a fee, most likely he wont be able to talk with potential buyers (It's highly likely that buyers do not have SNT to pay for the tribute).
This could be potentially mitigated by introducing Identities in Status, where a seller could create an identity exclusive for selling and this one wouldn't have TtT fees associated.
Ideas
[@jrainville]: Not sure if it would be possible, but for people that don't have SNT or ETH, there could be a credit system where you use crypto that you don't possess. Everyone would have a credit limit and as soon as you buy crypto, it gets consumed by the system to pay back the dept (interest rate or no is to be decided). The credit limit could be increased maybe by paying an SNT tribute or just like normal credit systems, it increases the more you pay your "bill", meaning that if you keep using the credit system, but are good at paying it, the system will increase your limit. Another option could be that the seller that's discussing could pay the price for the buyer and when the purchase is made, the crypto burned by the seller would be reimbursed by what the buyer buys (eg: he burned 25 SNT while discussing, the buyer buys 200 SNT, the buyer only gets 175). Again, we could have an interest rate if we want. Also, the number of messages sent to the buyer should be limited to prevent spam.