Indorse is excited to announce a strategic collaboration with AppCoins, the first ever ICO serving 200 million active users, supported by Aptoide App Store. The collaboration comes before Indorse’s MVP launch later this month and sees both companies working together to share data between their individual user reputation systems. This will allow Indorse users to verify the ownership of any app on Aptoide App Store and will let Aptoide users check an Indorse developer’s reputation.

Within the scope of the partnership, all Indorse token holders will be granted access to the exclusive pre-sale of AppCoins, which will end November 20 (see details on how to participate at the end of this post).

AppCoins — the new currency of the app economy

With over six years of existence and 200 million users worldwide, Aptoide has noted that conventional app stores are stifling innovation in three main ways: inefficient and costly advertisement; inaccessible in-app purchases for the mass market; and a lack of transparency and trust between developers and users.

With AppCoins, users can earn tokens through engaging with app advertising and then spend this currency on in-app purchases (such as game items and upgrades). Users who currently lack access to traditional payment methods will gain a chance to buy items that were previously inaccessible. In addition, a blockchain ledger will record all developers’ reputations, increasing the reliability of apps in the marketplace.

In addition to the greater user engagement potential, the model removes the need for payment or advertisement intermediaries. This promises greater return on investment and increased monetization potential for developers.

AppCoins’ potential extends beyond the Aptoide platform, since the tokens will be made compatible for all app stores. With that in mind, an App Store Foundation will be created to coordinate the development of the protocol and reference implementation under an open governance model.

Indorse and AppCoins collaboration

Aptoide is creating the first cryptocurrency for app stores, AppCoins. The latter is to become an open protocol adoptable by any app store, addressing the three main inefficiences of the app economy: (i) Mobile Advertising; (ii) In-App Billing and (iii) App Approval. For the last point, App Approval, AppCoins aims to create a more transparent and secure app approval process and will collaborate with Indorse who is also building a reputation system to power their blockchain-based social network.

Gaurang Torvekar, co-founder and CTO of Indorse, said: “From the start of our journey, it has been our aim to provide users with benefits that current social network sites are denying them, such as data ownership, privacy, and security. In order to take on the leaders in this space, we require a strong network of partner platforms utilizing the reputation system and AppCoins is one of them.”

Tiago Alves, VP APAC for Aptoide, added: “We believe that the collaboration with Indorse will be beneficial for both the platforms, since AppCoins can benefit from Indorse’s reputation system to validate the profile of new Android developers and, on the other hand, all the apps uploaded to Aptoide can be an additional data point for Indorse to validate someone’s skills”.

How to participate in AppCoins’ exclusive pre-sale (https://appcoins.io/presale)

Indorse token holders can access the exclusive pre-sale and benefit from a 30% discount offered to selected groups by going to https://appcoins.io/presale and under ‘Web Summit & Guest Investors’ insert the following code (use upper case):

APPCOINS_INDORSE

(note: potential investors must use the same wallet address that contains the IND tokens)