How to Buy Populous (PPT): Quick Guide

DISCLAIMER: None of the following is intended to be investment advice. This is only meant to be a description of what has worked well for me so far, and my own opinions. Also, full disclosure, my links to Coinbase, Binance, KuCoin etc., include referrals. It actually benefits you to use them because we will both get an extra $10 worth of BTC for free if you deposit at least $100 to Coinbase. Thanks in advance if you follow the links when you make your accounts - and even if you don’t, I hope this guide helps you out!

This guide will teach you how to buy PPT from square one (i.e., all you have is fiat money, no cryptos). It will also work for most other cryptocurrencies, but as I’m interested in PPT right now, I am going to write a quick foreword about it and then we’ll get right into the meat of the guide. For those of you who know nothing about this coin, this foreword will give you a high level overview of Populous.

A Little About PPT - Why Buy?

There is a massive subset of people who are new to the crypto-space entirely but have only heard of Bitcoin. Then they go online and they search around and figure out there are actually many, many cryptocurrencies out there with many different use cases. For Populous, the use case involves something called “invoice financing” which, I would guess, few people outside of the business world understand or know anything about. So, in light of that, let’s talk about what invoice financing is. Investopedia’s definition of the phrase starts with this:

“A way for businesses to borrow money based on amounts due from customers. Invoice financing helps businesses improve cash flow, pay employees and suppliers, and reinvest in operations and growth earlier than they could if they had to wait until their customers paid them. Businesses pay a percentage of the invoice amount to the lender as a fee for borrowing the money. Invoice financing can solve problems associated with customers taking a long time to pay and difficulties obtaining other types of business credit.”

So we’re basically talking about a sort of credit here - or, if you like, loans where you are essentially borrowing against what your customers owe you but haven’t yet paid. Because there is a form of collateral involved (the invoice which, at least in most cases, will end up getting paid by the customer at some point), this is a “secured” rather than “unsecured” loan.

To put this in real world terms, imagine I own a realty company and I’ve sold five houses for two million dollars total. The paperwork is all signed and I’ve invoiced my customers but I might not actually get paid for a few months. Through a form of invoice financing called “factoring,” I can find a lender - usually some financial institution like a bank. I will then effectively “sell” them my five invoices worth two million dollars for 70% or more of their value, so 1.4 million. The lender is (hopefully) later paid directly by the customer - if they are, then they then pass the remaining 30% on to me, taking a fee for their trouble. In this way I can get effectively pocket a substantial portion of my profits before the customer can realistically finish paying me. This is important in many businesses because you’d like to reinvest as soon as possible; in this real-world example, I’d probably want to quickly buy more houses!

I’ve written previously about coins such as SALT which seek to bring cryptocurrency into the lending industry in other ways, but what I appreciate about Populous is that its goals are very narrowly focused. My research on Populous opened my eyes to how huge the world of invoice finance is, even though it’s something most people probably don’t even realize exists.

Populous interests me mainly because, like many highly lucrative breakthroughs, it seeks to eliminate the middle-man. There are many industries where “middle men” extract a profit without injecting much value - in the automobile industry, for example, there’s no particularly good reason for dealerships to exist anymore. In a sane world, customers would purchase their vehicles directly from the manufacturers at a significantly reduced price— but absurd bureaucracy and draconian laws keep the system in place.

Like the automobile industry, the world of invoice financing is plagued by middle men, only in this case the middle men are the financial institutions themselves. Populous’s whitepaper describes a sort of sophisticated “auction house” where invoice sellers and buyers can interact. Documentation regarding the invoices is provided, and buyers proceed to bid on it. Without getting too technical about it, the actual PPT will help to facilitate this process - so, if the Populous Platform actually revolutionizes invoice finance, it would be reasonable to expect PPT to become quite valuable.

The idea of an invoice auction marketplace is nothing new, but with cryptocurrency many of the existing problems with the system are solved. I’ve read about many complaints about traditional fiat invoice auction marketplaces, which run the gamut from outrageous fees, to nebulousness regarding when an invoice will actually get financed, to issues with verification of sellers’ relationships with their customers.

Some Caveats, Downsides & Price Evaluation

There are some big questions I have about Populous which give me cause for concern. For starters, it’s a reasonably high value coin - not top ten, but still ranked #27 with a market capitalization of over one and a half billion dollars. Despite the big money invested into this coin, I can’t find any kind of active community for it online. Out of the three subreddits I could find for it, one had no moderator (account deleted) and the other two had almost no subscribers (less than 50). What is going on here, exactly? Why is no one talking about this coin? It’s confusing enough that I went ahead and created a subreddit for it, mostly to teach myself about Reddit moderation, but also to give people a decent space to discuss the coin. It is very confusing, though —by comparison, my current favorite coin is ARK, and while it has half the market capitalization of Populous, its subreddit has almost twenty thousand subscribers. Is Populous’s market capitalization artificially inflated somehow? Is it a ponzi scheme? Is this just vaporware? Where is the userbase? I realize this may sound harsh, but these are important questions. After all, this is your money at stake if you’re an investor!

I should note that I have been informed that there is a Populous Telegram group with about 1600 members and a Populous Slack channel with around 450 members. This does explain where at least some of PPT’s userbase is gathering.

02/01/2018 Update: I have claimed the populous_platform subreddit as a moderator. Perhaps we can get a decent Reddit community going!

Personally, it is still hard for me to believe that this is ever going to be a top 5 coin. As far as I can tell SALT, if its Lending Platform succeeds, covers a far wider variety of use cases in the financing world than Populous. That’s not to say that Populous is a bad investment, though - as I’ve mentioned, invoice financing is a very large industry and there is a lot of money to be made in it. Thus, I would be remiss if I didn’t do a quick price evaluation on this token.

Let’s compare Populous to Dash, which is currently ranked #10 on coinmarketcap with a market capitalization of $9,222,118,818. If PPT had Dash’s current market cap, it would be worth roughly $250 per PPT. That’s more than 5 times the current price (less than $50). So, there is certainly room for growth here. For now I have an extremely wary eye about this coin, but it still interests me enough to grab a few— so let’s go ahead and learn how to buy Populous!

Buying PPT: Basic Strategy

To date I’ve had no problems with the following basic strategy:

Create and sign into a Coinbase account. I recommend Coinbase because they are the most straightforward exchange. Purchase some ETH. At the time of this writing, this currency transfers the fastest and cheapest out of anything Coinbase offers. Litecoin competes here, but will cause hiccups later in the process - more on that later. Create and sign in to a Binance account. If you are American, Binance is currently not accepting new American clients - use KuCoin instead. I recommend Binance because they have been reliable and convenient for me and they offer many different lesser-known cryptocurrencies with trading pairs on both ETH and BTC. An added bonus is that you can withdraw up to 2 BTC/day worth of funds with no verification at all. Alternate exchange options: HitBTC and KuCoin also trade EOS - I have written a guide to using HitBTC and a guide to using KuCoin which you will find useful. Move your ETH to Binance. Once it has confirmed, you can now easily use the ETH/PPT trading pair to buy as much or as little Populous as you want. More on trading pairs later. Send your coins from Binance to a safe PPT wallet for long term storage if you intend to hold for awhile. This is not strictly necessary but it is considered a safer option than keeping ANY coin on ANY exchange long term. I personally believe Coinomi to be the safest and most convenient wallet for many cryptocurrencies. This is a little more complicated with ERC-20 tokens like PPT, but is well worth it. More on this later.

Now, if you’re a power user or someone with some existing familiarity with cryptocurrency, you can probably stop here. The rest of this guide is just going to be a more in-depth description of the preceding steps. If you’re completely new to cryptocurrencies, you might be a little lost - that’s fine! You won’t be by the time you finish this guide. I’ll go step by step:

Starting Out On Coinbase

This is arguably the most trusted exchange currently on the market. You can think of them as the PayPal of the cryptocurrency world, with all the good and bad connotations that come along with that. There are some countries where this is not the case! For example, in Canada, one would probably want to use QuadrigaCX instead. Unfortunately, that’s outside the scope of this guide, but I may do a country-by-country guide for acquiring coins later.

All you have to do here is go to Coinbase’s website and create an account. Security is incredibly important here - remember, in cryptocurrencies you are your own bank and so it is absolutely crucial that you follow good security practices. This means your password should be strong - and it should be a password you aren’t using anywhere else (including other exchanges). Google has a pretty good guide with some tips on choosing strong passwords. Keeping security in mind, it would also behoove you to turn on two-factor authentication once your account is created.

Once you are up and running there are a number of options when it comes to actually paying for coins via Coinbase. It is possible to link your bank account to Coinbase but actually transferring coins out of Coinbase will be impossible for a few days while the funds are clearing. This is obviously not ideal if you want to move quickly, as you would now have to wait several days to move your coins to an exchange where you can trade them for PPT (or any other coin).

Instead, I would recommend you link a credit or debit card to Coinbase. This will allow you to purchase some amount of coins immediately, and then immediately send them off wherever you want - your wallet, another exchange, etc. At the time of this writing Coinbase offers three coins: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Litecoin (LTC).

What to Buy First?

In my opinion if you intend to buy lesser-known coins like PPT, ETH is the best choice to buy here. Why? Well, with regards to LTC, the reason is clear: other exchanges like Binance offer direct trading pairs for BTC and ETH, but not LTC or any other currency. What this means is that you could directly exchange your ETH for PPT, or your BTC for PPT, but you’d have to perform another step if you wanted to trade your LTC for PPT (and that means more fees!). Obviously we don’t want to waste even one cent if we can avoid it, so LTC is out.

With regards to BTC, at the time of this writing there have been a lot of rumblings about high transaction fees, slow transaction times, etc. Exchanges often overpay these fees as well, and that means that you are again risking missing out on more money than you need to.

ETH is therefore currently the best choice for our purposes by default - fastest transaction speed, lowest transaction cost. So, to review: create a Coinbase account, link your credit or debit card, and purchase ETH.

I Bought ETH: What Now?

Now is the time for you to make your Binance account. Follow the link and create an account using a strong password (this should be different than the one you used for Coinbase!). There are other places where you may be able to buy PPT (Changelly and Kucoin are two reputable examples). There are other reputable exchanges as well, but be careful about using lesser known exchanges - scams do exist! This guide focuses on Binance because my experience there has been 100% positive - I have transferred coins in and out of their system many times with no problems.

Once your account is made, you should set up two-factor authentication here via Google Authenticator. It’s safer, and you will need it to transfer coins out of Binance anyway. More on this later.

After your Binance account is made, click “Funds” at the top right, then “Deposits Withdrawals” beneath it. Find Ethereum in the list and click the “Deposit” button on the far right. You should end up with something that looks like this: