With the word out that early this week that famed
cryptocurrency VCs the Winklevoss twins have successfully launched Gemini,
their own Bitcoin (BTC) exchange, after BitLicense approval was finally secured
from New York’s financial regulatory body (the NYDFS), disruptive payment
technologies enabled by digital currencies like Bitcoin may finally be coming
into their own. The move by New York to lead the charge and validate the
alternative currency space with foundational legislation that allows
BitLicensed players to operate with unimpeachable legitimacy, combined with the
hardfork that is Bitcoin XT (an adaptation that will allow for a massive leap
in the transaction processing bandwidth at the heart of the BTC network), have
really taken Bitcoin and digital payments to a whole new level.
When it comes to disruptive new payment technology enablers
like Bitcoin, the real money to be made is not so much in the currency itself,
as it is in the payments processing end of the market. As Bitcoin continues to
become a global digital currency, the rapid proliferation of smartphones,
mobile wallet solutions and the rise of mcommerce, collectively mean that the
sky is the limit for what is effectively a completely new commerce-empowering
ecosystem of payment technologies. Borderless digital currencies like Bitcoin,
as well as the requisite exchanges, payment processing technologies, and
end-user software needed to transform commerce, have all cropped up extremely
fast too. Springing seemingly Athena-like, fully armored from the forehead of
Zeus (a legacy electronic payments infrastructure that is ripe for disruption),
this new ecosystem of digital payment technologies and virtual currencies has
evolved so quickly that only a handful of companies today are really ready to
both participate, and genuinely thrive.
One such company is Alternet Systems. Structured as an
enterprise accelerator, ALYI has been focused for some time now on the two core
areas that are of the utmost significance to investors in this rapidly growing
ecosystem: the digital currencies and exchanges, as well as the payment
processing solutions needed to truly reshape the face of an antiquated payments
infrastructure. Moreover, Alternet Systems is taking the long view of the
market’s true potential, focusing in on the big data aspect of digital
commerce, as well as the bounteous field of associated predictive data
analytics made accessible thereby. Sure, moving to be one of the first players
alongside the Winklevoss twins to wade into the exchange game via New York
State BitLicense acquisition – as part of a global exchange roll-up strategy
executed through the company’s wholly-owned OneMarket (www.onemarket.net)
subsidiary – is going to be the backbone of the data acquisition architecture,
but it is the payment processing end of things that will generate the really
high-value data that players like advertisers and retailers salivate over.
Big data-driven retail analytics is a marketing crystal ball
and in many respects, a solid, truly 21st century implementation thereof is
seen as a sort of brass ring by the sector which has long been sought after by
the biggest names in retail and advertising. Mcommerce, combined with digital
currencies and the associated payment technologies, offers a symbiotic,
software-driven mechanism for not only understanding user spending habits as
never before, but doing so in a very lightweight fashion that is practically
invisible to the consumer. This light touch, combined with extremely rigorous
data accumulation and the penetrating analytics to go along with it, is
something which is already beginning to transform the retail space. A crowning
example of what is possible here might be Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ: AMZN)
anticipatory shipping solution, with its patented algorithm-based predictive analytics
that can basically see the future, getting packages ready to ship before the
consumer even clicks the “Add to Cart” button.
Alternet Systems has taken major steps to ensure that the
company is able to maximize shareholder return on investment when it comes to
exploiting the company’s early adopter advantage in the cryptocurrency and
ecommerce/mcommerce space. Items such as the appointment of Fabio Alvino to the
CEO position at the company’s wholly-owned digital currency and payment
ecosystems subsidiary, Alternet Payment Solutions, speaks volumes about how
serious ALYI is in this regard. Alvino is the guy who founded one of the top
mobile financial services operators on earth, UTIBA Americas, which was later
acquired by mobile financial services pioneer Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), the company
which famously launched the very first digital wallet solution in existence
back in 2004, known as Globe GCash. Needless to say, Alvino punches well above
his weight in the game and will be instrumental in bringing ALYI’s digital
currency ecosystem and exchange roll-up strategies to fruition.
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