Dether: Driving Mass Adoption of Ether as Peer-to-peer Electronic Cash

Dether’s goal is to enable anyone globally to buy ether with cash or spend it at physical stores by introducing a new decentralized solution that enables anyone on Earth to interact with Ethereum blockchain.

What is Dether?

With the many requirements to access digital currency, such as bank accounts and exchange registrations, Dether wants to sidestep these problems with the world’s first peer-to-peer ether network that enables anyone who has a phone to buy and sell ether using cash and even spend it at physical stores. An upcoming crowdsale will offer investors tokens that complement the ecosystem and incentivize peer-to-peer trading activity.

The Problems Addressed by Dether

The goal of Dether is to decentralize the process of buying and selling ether, which remains a centralized process that is long and arduous. For example, there is the time and opportunity cost. Registering online, depositing money and getting verified takes days or weeks. Time that could be better spent elsewhere. While decentralization is the blockchain’s main value proposition, centralized exchanges and other actors play a large role in the process of buying cryptocurrencies. Furthermore, the unbanked have little to no access to cryptocurrencies, while merchants are looking for ways to easily transfer between cryptocurrency and cash before embracing greater adoption.

Dether creates a worldwide ecosystem of ether buyers, sellers and physical stores willing to trade ether for fiat cash and accept it as a means of payment. Dether provides the infrastructure for people to embrace the Ethereum technology in their everyday lives, relying on mobile phones with internet access. No bank account is needed to buy and sell ether and no credit/debit card is needed to spend ether at physical stores. With other features too, Dether hopes to kickstart the decentralization of trading ether.

Users are able to discover ether sellers, called tellers, near them on the Dether map, their ETH/fiat rate, the fees that they take, and anonymously chat with them. Buyers are free to engage a conversation with the seller they want to in order to agree on the trading conditions and the meeting point for exchanging ether for cash.

Dether users are able to discover shops near them that accept ether or are willing to buy or sell ether for cash. Dether aims at making Ethereum accessible to anyone on Earth who wishes to interact with it. Thus, Dether is built on features that guarantee its use by anyone who owns a smartphone and has internet access.

An example is provided in the project’s whitepaper of how a trade would pan out in real life. Imagine someone who travels a lot due to the nature of their job and suppose they want to trade some ether for Algerian Dinars rather than the Euros they have:

Denis goes on Dether to trade ether for Algerian dinars.

Denis creates a Dether Wallet (D-Wallet) within seconds and transfers 2.5 ether to it

He discovers ether buyers near him on the Dether map. He quickly sees that Nadia is also currently located at the airport, and that she would like to trade the sufficient amount of dinars that Denis needs for ether. None of them have access to each other’s personal data. Pseudonyms and avatars are being shown on the Dether app.

Denis and Nadia chat anonymously together in order the agree on a price and a safe meeting point at the airport. They decide to trade 2.5 ether for Algerian dinars with a 3 percent profit rate that goes to Denis.

As Denis has saved 2.5 ethers in his D-Wallet, Nadia can verify that he has it before he meets up with Nadia in front the coffee shop at Gate 3.

When they meet, Denis scans Nadia’s wallet QR Code to transfer the 2.5 ether to her wallet, and Nadia gives the cash to Denis.

When the trade is done, a pop-up displays on both of their phones that allows them to evaluate the transaction.

As it went well for both of them, they both get a better personal rating on their profile on the Dether map that will help them for their next trade.

Dether’s Target Market

By examining existing peer-to-peer services such as LocalBitcoins, looking at smartphone penetration around the world and considering the growing popularity of Ethereum, Dether has identified and segmented its target markets as follows; early adopters (including China, Europe, US, South Korea, Venezuela, Singapore, South Africa, Argentina, and Mexico), early majority (Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Colombia, Nigeria), and late majority (Vietnam and Indonesia).

Moreover, Dether have identified a space in the market for peer-to-peer services and the graphic below illustrates how the project will position itself against services such as LocalBitcoins, Mycelium, and Kraken.

Dether will hold a crowdsale for ÐTR, an ERC20 token that allows people from all over the world to participate in Dether’s development, in December 2017. Following the ICO, in 2018 we will see developments such as the Teller Dap. A total of 100 million ÐTR will be minted during the crowdsale and ether will be accepted for purchase. The token distribution is displayed below.

ÐTR tokens serve two main purposes. First, they allow users to access additional features and gain better visibility on the Dether map. Merchants or tellers can stake ÐTR so that buyers can find them more easily. Eventually, an auction system will determine the merchant or teller that will gain visibility if there are several in a single area.

Second, a buyback program will be launched, so as Dether becomes more popular, the number of ÐTR tokens can be decreased. A fully detailed procedure will be published in the near future.

The founders have significant experience with blockchain technology in a commercial setting. For instance, Medhi Amari and Abdelhamid Benyahia both have a background working on proof of concepts for CAC40 companies. Also, the founders have both contributed to international remittance services based on the blockchain, which lead them to the idea of Dether. In Q1 2017, the proof of concept for the project that enabled users to register as a seller on a map, chat with buyers and trade won First Prize in the Merkle Week Hackathon in Paris.

In summary, Dether is a new peer-to-peer trading platform that utilizes ERC20 tokens to incentivize merchant adoption and the use of ether as a medium of exchange. There are no third parties involved in the process, and terms of trade, the cryptocurrency transactions, and chats are all in the hands of the users solving many of the problems we find in the cryptocurrency landscape such as centralized exchanges and a lack of adoption amongst the unbanked.

You can find out more about Dether by joining their Slack: http://slack.dether.io/ or you can try out the alpha version here.