intimate co-founder Leah Callon-Butler spoke with Crypto Finder on the adult cryptocurrency platform's Ethereum-based ITM token works

Interview from Blockchain Week London on 23 January 2018.

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What is Intimate?

Read the transcript:

Why create your own token?

So there's actually a lot of privacy coins out there already. You might have heard things like Zcash and Monero and Dash. What they're really designed to do is essentially hide transactions, afford that privacy element, but they don't have the added trust and reputation layer on the top. So that's where we're taking it a step further. We think that people should be able to transact privately, and we think that that's going to do a lot of good for that industry in terms of flooding in more customers, but we don't want people to be acting shady essentially.

There needs to be an incentive and a reward system really for people to be able to be good actors on the network, and I can talk a bit more in detail later if you like about how the trust and reputation system works. The second thing around why we need a new token is that, go with the granddaddy of crypto, bitcoin, a lot of the adult platforms that were already accepting bitcoin, a lot of them have got rid of it now because the transaction fees could be higher than the item or service that you're buying, depending on what it is.

But even prior to the scalability issues, business operators were noticing that out of their entire revenue, bitcoin was actually a minute amount of their total transactions. Lots of problems with that. There's no one actually driving bitcoin to apply it to the industry, and the adult industry is pretty unique. It does have some players there who have experienced institutional bias for such a long time around banking institutions that won't deal with them completely on moral grounds, payment gateways that won't deal with them for the same reasons and it goes on and on.

But they're quite wary of being able to accept these new payment forms and does it actually suit their business. So what we can do is launch a token which is (a) tailored to the industry to provide special attributes and features that are actually relevant to that use case, like the trust and reputation layer. But also, if we're honest, blockchain is pretty clunky, infantile technology which is evolving at lightning pace. We're still seeing a lot of issues with things like scalability and fees rising, forks, governance of foundations.

There's a lot of issues there that people are working really hard to solve, but in the meantime, they're very real. So our token is actually blockchain agnostic. We raise on an ERC 20 token, so it will be on the Ethereum blockchain, but if we need to move, we retain that right to be able to completely transport that token over to another blockchain. That could be something like EOS or NEO or Waves or Cardano or any other exceptional smart contracts platform which will handle our trust and reputation system.

But in that way, we can make sure that the people using the token don't have that headache of, you know, "the complexity of crypto is just too overwhelming. I just want the benefits in the same way that I use my banking systems right now without having to learn about all this other stuff." So in that way, when we have a specific token, we can actually manage all of that complexity for the people who are using our token every day.

So where will the token be listed, to begin with?

So we've got an intimate digital wallet, which will be on your phone. At first, we're really focusing on the payments bundling around people who will just come into the intimate digital wallet, purchase tokens there and use it with all of our partners.

So if you're using this as a purchase, it's as easy as just going through and essentially, if you think of it, almost like buying credit for your phone type of thing?

Exactly, and that's what we're going for to and it's around that utility of the token making sure that it's actually being used with our partners who want to accept intimate tokens as payment. Of course, you know, there's a lot of hype around the crypto space around the appreciation of tokens and which one should I invest in, which one should I buy now to become a millionaire overnight.

It's not really the space that we play in. We're very much about solving the problems of the industry. So our goal is to make sure that people can buy the token and pay with it immediately, so that we can actually start to see it having some impact on the problems that exist.

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