Have you ever heard of Bitcoin, Ethereum or the term Blockchain before? If yes, then you are currently (June 2017) one of only a few million people in the entire world. But there is a reason why governments, companies and millions of others are interested in this topic. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies promise to solve problems, that have been thought to be insolvable, especially when it comes to speed, trust and accessibility. This is why the world economic forum predicts, that in the next 10 years around 10% of the entire world economic trade will be based on blockchain technology, which would equal 7.8 Trillion USD in today’s terms.

Once you start getting into that environment you realize one big problem though that keeps this technology from truly breaking through: it is actually really hard to use Bitcoin or Ether in everyday life. In theory everything sounds great and nice, but if you actually want to spend them at “a real world store” it is pretty much impossible. For example, today to use your Bitcoin, you have to change them back into Dollars or any other fiat currency that you could actually use first, by sending the money to an exchange. Then you wait to get authorized, you pay some fees, wait again, until you can finally use your money several days later. That is not really feasible. Also, with more and more use cases, the entire blockchain space becomes very fragmented and it gets very hard for consumers and businesses to understand, which currency to actually focus on. So many prefer to stay on the sidelines rather than taking part.

End of 2014 I met my co-founders Toby and Paul on a trip to Bangkok. They were thinking about solving the same problem and were also searching for a solution to make cryptocurrencies usable. Together we co-founded TenX — to make payments easier than sending a text. This is how we do it: We have developed a protocol called COMIT, that connects all the blockchains in the background and is becoming an industry standard. Now it does not matter anymore how many blockchains are out there or what new ones coming in. They can get connected either by us or by the other blockchain’s operator. It is basically the same as the internet protocol connects Intranets to the Internet. We have also partnered up with several debit card providers, so our users can spend their Bitcoin, Ether or any other blockchain asset at literally millions of stores worldwide. Spending your Bitcoin suddenly becomes as easy as spending a 10 dollar note in your pocket. Getting started is as quick as downloading our app, filling in your phone number and e-mail and you are ready to go. We don’t charge our users any fees, because we get a kickback from the merchant for every transaction.

We had a trial test in Singapore with a couple 1,000 users to make sure everything from sending out cards to security and not losing our customer’s money is working smoothly. It has been working great so far and the feedback has been extremely helpful. Our users not only made payments in Singapore, but bought coffees, flight tickets, food and much more with Bitcoin and other blockchain assets all over the world.

With all this successful testing, we are now ready to move forward and ship globally from June 24th 2017. This is a huge breakthrough for the entire blockchain community and a major stepping stone to mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. Looking at how people view crypto currencies today, the technology that supports what we do and the current legal and economic development, there has never been a better time to make our vision of helping people all around the world to spend they cryptocurrencies anywhere anytime.

The author Dr. Julian Hosp is the co-founder of TenX and co-author of the whitepapers of TenX and COMIT.

TenX (www.tenx.tech) is a Singapore-based Fintech company that makes any blockchain asset spendable instantly by offering a debit card payment system to its users on the frontend and by connecting any blockchain at the backend through COMIT.

COMIT is an open source project that connects any blockchain without creating an extra token. Whitepaper: www.comit.network