“How I would use COTI,” a letter from our community member tells us just how COTI Follow Jul 17, 2018 · 4 min read

One of our community members recently reached out to us with his thoughts on the COTI project. We really valued your feedback, Lars, and enjoyed hearing how COTI could be of help to you. Read more below

Dear COTI team, I’d like to thank your amazing team, you are really doing a great job! Following you on Telegram is such great fun.

I can imagine what an exciting time you are experiencing. You are still a ‘project’ and not an established ‘product’… just wait a few weeks to see COTI successfully running for the first time on Alpha — that feeling of happiness will be overwhelming! And don’t be disappointed, if something goes wrong. No software is free of bugs, that’s life, but I’m convinced COTI will be a great success. And here is my personal COTI story:

My family and I like travelling, and we are lucky to have this opportunity. As we live in Europe, travelling here is so easy, and as long as you are visiting euro countries paying isn’t difficult. Using your local debit card at ATMs, for shopping, for everything is fine (no fees!) We’re currently planning to spend our next holiday in North America, and that’s where my headaches began. It all started at the travel agency’s’ office. I have a credit card with optional travel insurance if the trip is paid with this card. Unfortunately the travel agent didn’t accept my credit card because of Visa’s high fees. My bank offers 4 free withdrawals at foreign ATMs, which sounds great, but if you only withdraw a few bucks from the machine so you don’t carry around a large amount of cash then with 4 withdrawals you won’t survive very long. This means a lot of expensive withdrawals. Maybe using credit cards would help? My bank calculates a charge of about 2–4% for spending money with Visa plus fees charged by the foreign bank, but then there’s the expensive exchange rate € → $. Then there’s the crazy fees of my American Express Card: 4% charges + additional 2% for foreign currency conversion.

What are all these banks and credit card companies, which I have to trust anyway, doing with my hard-earned money? There are no humans (who I would gladly pay for) involved in these money transfers. It is all done by machines, but does that justify all these fees? Is this the price for trust? It all feels wrong and unfair. I might use one of the Bitcoin ATMs in North America to get some dollars. I am just preparing my crypto wallet, but there is also a fee for that. At any rate, it’s better to pay fees for crypto than for fiat! That’s my little revenge ;-) With COTI I hope for a much better world with low to zero fees. Paying with COTI all over the world and not getting bothered about banks and fees will be awesome! Really can’t wait to spend some COTI to buy products sometime next year.

Wishing you all the best, Lars

In the decentralized economy of the future, there is a need for a decentralized payment platform, which is exactly where COTI comes into the picture. COTI is building a platform that creates payment networks over DAG. It powers merchants, payment service providers, entrepreneurs and financial organizations with a full solution that can help them replace cash, credit cards and banks.

We are more than excited to hear how our community members can benefit from COTI in real day-to-day situations. Reach out to us anytime with your thoughts and feedback to contact@coti.io or on our Telegram channel.

Our AlphaNet launch is fast approaching! Don’t miss out, be sure to sign up to COTI today at https://coti.io/en/consumers.html

The COTI team