We are pleased to bring to you an interview with Salvador Casquero, one of our founders. He has over 25 years of work experience with companies like JP Morgan, BBVA, La Caixa, and Banco Sabadell. He has held a number of roles such as an FX Trader and Electronic Business Director.

Read on to discover what 2gether means to one of the founders and how his vision has helped shaped the company.

What is 2gether and what problem are you trying to solve in the world?

2gether is a new financial platform trying to recover bankings primary function: to promote economic activity. That is exactly the problem we are trying to solve. Banks did a fantastic job promoting world economies from the very beginning of commerce: manual bartering. However, we have reached a point where some economies are unsustainable.

2gether leverages two technologies to empower both the producer and the consumer, and has created a P2P distribution channel to facilitate the trading of assets.

How does 2gether reflect the current financial system, and what is its role within it?

2gether aims to transition from our current financial system centered on FIAT to a new monetary system that is gaining ground based on tokenization, this is where blockchain makes sense.

The concept of finance was born from manual bartering, moving to intrinsic value representations –salt, pepper, bones-, to intrinsic value coins -gold, silver, copper- to fiduciary money. Money can represent almost everything but only has perceptible value because there is a trusted counterparty, the central bank. This in turn, can cause issue. Central banks can tighten or loosen (QE) their monetary policy which affects the underlying value of printed money.

Blockchain has emerged as a new digital bartering technology where everybody has the opportunity to issue their own coin or token backed by a real asset they own. But more importantly blockchain 1.0 has been improved by blockchain 2.0 making those tokens smarter. We will be able to start a new digital commerce, aka finance, based on smart tokens where the real asset owner will be able to embed business rules on them, with neither inflation nor deflation, delivering it with no intermediaries and under his own rules. New economies will be emerging, such as collaborative economies, sharing resources, zero marginal costs, gig economies, IoT economies and circular economies. The first two tokens we will create are the EUR itself and our own token 2GT, which will be used for building 2gether as a collaborative project. The 2GT token will operate as an ERC-20 compatible token.

How is it possible to pay with Ether? Do you plan to include more Crypto as time progresses?

The way it works is quite simple: we are fully compliant so we spent lot of time working with our card provider to get our model approved. The user can have a prepaid-debit card debiting off their crypto balance; once we receive the payment requirement from the merchant, we sell the equivalent amount of crypto needed to cover the FIAT amount.

This FIAT money is used to fund the user’s card for the normal settlement of the transaction. It is important to state that all card charges are operated in FIAT currency; at this moment there are no debit cards integrating crypto that are fully compliant. We are thrilled to have been one of the first startups in the world to get this approval. We will start with ETH but are open in the future to other crypto currencies that the community may want.

Why did you select the Ethereum network? If a better competitor emerges will you be able to migrate blockchains if and when they prove to be better platforms?

We selected it as when we started the company, a couple of years ago, Ethereum was at the forefront of development. I initially discovered Ethereum in 2014 and quickly realized the power of smart contracts; the ability to embed business rules within them to change the way we can trade with others.

We started developing on top of the Ethereum Blockchain. It is true that as time evolves there is potential for other blockchain technologies that may eclipse Ethereum in terms of scalability and efficiency. We have developed 2gether with the proviso that we may need to move from Ethereum to a different blockchain. This is one of the key reasons we employ a private blockchain in conjunction with the Ethereum Blockchain. Blockchain is a fantastic working technology but still suffers from some growing pains. Think about traditional banks, you can criticize a lot of their actions but the truth is they have built confidence over hundreds of years, while Blockchain still has several issues.

Regulators: They don’t believe Blockchain has been vetted enough to migrate all finances to this technology. In fact, the European Banking Authority still bans banks to work with crypto. Scalability: They are able to validate a limited number of transactions per second, whereas banks can process several hundred thousand per second. This underlines the level to which the technology still has to develop. This needs to be demonstrated in real world scenarios, not test nets. Fees: Due to this lack of scalability, fees are unsustainable for just buying a chewing gum or a cup of coffee. Governability: We are still in the early stages to assert that decentralization will correctly solve problems when they manifest. Speculation: The economy needs money flow to function properly. If you suspect that your BTC or ETH will be higher in value tomorrow you will refrain from spending it thus making commerce impossible to happen.

There are some other minor reasons like having the society fully prepared but those are easier to overcome as they are more cultural than actual roadblocks. For these issues, we are building our own private blockchain but as I always say to the team, we must build it with a transitional mindset in order to make an orderly and regulate move to public and decentralized blockchains.